Vista - Memory problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike

Hi,

I bought 4 Gb RAM DDR 2 King max memory.

Vista (Bussines edition) does not recognize it and show me 3,25 GB.

I am sure that comp is ok because during start BIOS showing 4.194.304
bytes.

Can you help me and tell me how to fix this problem.

Thanks to all.

Mike
 
I believe theres a few posts here about it but basically 32bit os will not
show you all 4gb, though it may make use of it, where as 64bit os will show
all ram.
 
I believe theres a few posts here about it but basically 32bit os will not
show you all 4gb, though it may make use of it, where as 64bit os will show
all ram.
Click to expand...

Thanks. If I uderstand you well, I can use all 4Gb but I can't see it.
 
The issue here is not Vista 32 -- but rather how the motherboard BIOS
handles memory between 3G and 4G. LOTS of threads on this.
 
Your memory shortage is a limitation of any 32bit operating system. Any
32bit OS can only address 4GB of RAM and this includes memory for all
devices in the the system. So, if your video adapter has 512MB of RAM,
your maximum memory is going to at most be 3.5GB. Mine has 640 MBytes
and System Info shows my memory as 3324.95MB total physical memory.

There is little you can do about this except swap to vista 64bit where
the 4GB limitation doesn't exist. The bad news is there are few 64
drivers available at present and lots of software isn't available as 64
bit versions. So lots of stuff simply doesn't work. In my case I lose my
scanner, printer, and various USB devices.

We are now in the same situation when we switched from 16bit to 32bit
OS's. Under dos and windows you had you use an extended memory manager
to address memory over 1024 MB. We tend to forget the good old 16 bit
dos days.

With XP you could boot with the /PAE switch which adds an extended
memory manager to allow applications to access memory over 4GB but even
this has limitations. I'm not sure if this switch is available in Vista
but if it is, you wont see any more total physical memory.

All modern PC's are 32bit and lots are true 64 Bit systems. In a true 64
bit system (ie the processor and motherboard support 64 bit) you can use
a 64 bit OS. For example 64 bit versions of the Windows Server 2003
operating system can use up to 1 terabyte of RAM.

The bottom line is if you want to see more total physical memory then
switching to vista 64 is the only solution.

Chas
 
Your memory shortage is a limitation of any 32bit operating system. Any
32bit OS can only address 4GB of RAM and this includes memory for all
devices in the the system. So, if your video adapter has 512MB of RAM,
your maximum memory is going to at most be 3.5GB. Mine has 640 MBytes
and System Info shows my memory as 3324.95MB total physical memory.

There is little you can do about this except swap to vista 64bit where
the 4GB limitation doesn't exist. The bad news is there are few 64
drivers available at present and lots of software isn't available as 64
bit versions. So lots of stuff simply doesn't work. In my case I lose my
scanner, printer, and various USB devices.

We are now in the same situation when we switched from 16bit to 32bit
OS's. Under dos and windows you had you use an extended memory manager
to address memory over 1024 KB. We tend to forget the good old 16 bit
dos days.

With XP you could boot with the /PAE switch which adds an extended
memory manager to allow applications to access memory over 4GB but even
this has limitations. I'm not sure if this switch is available in Vista
but if it is, you wont see any more total physical memory.

The bottom line is if you want to see more total physical memory then
switching to vista 64 is the only solution.

All modern PC's are 32bit and lots are 64 Bit systems. In a true 64 bit
system (ie the processor and motherboard support 64 bit) you can use a
64 bit OS. For example 64 bit versions of the Windows Server 2003
operating system can use up to 1 terabyte of RAM. I must be said that
most motherboard manufactures don't use the full 64bit memory addressing
scheme. For example, on my Intel DP865LT board the maximum addressable
memory is 8GB. So even if I use Vista 64 and have 8GB of ram installed,
Vista will not report 8GB of total physical memory, due to the device
memory uses as above



Chas
 
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