Vista showing more RAM than physically installed

  • Thread starter Thread starter eriche
  • Start date Start date
E

eriche

umm... well.. a while ago after a reformat, my computer showed that i had
25GB of RAM installed when i only had 1 GB... and now that i have replaced
that 1 GB with 2x 2GB RAM (4GB) it now shows that i have 18 GB...

can anyone explain to me why this might have happened and what i can do to
fix it?
 
I'm thinking that Vista has some issues on some certain configurations on
reporting hardware. It may be a setting somewhere. My old setup said I had a
10 GHz machine, when it was really 3.4 GHz. I never persued it, though, so I
don't know what the cause was.

What is your setup? OEM machine?

--

Dustin Harper
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.vistarip.com | Vista Resource & Information Page

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Where does it show the 25GB in the System BIOS or in Vista or in both? If
only in Vista on which Vista screens? "eriche"
 
firstly, i dont use readyboost and a thumb drive to speed up the system and
im not sure about the paging file....

this is an OEM machine running 32-bit Vista Home Premium with a Core 2 Duo
2.13 Ghz, which i just recently overclocked to 2.4 GHz. however, in the bios
it shows 4096 MB RAM (4GB) but in the vista system properties window it shows
18 GB.
 
That's funny, it does weird stuff like that as well for me and my systems.

On my current system, it says I'm running at 4.80 GHz (I'm running at 3.2
GHz).

On my daughter's system, it says she has 2.00 Gigs of RAM (she has two 512
meg sticks and no open slots).

I don't know how it detects things, but it does it incorrectly. I do know it
hasn't caused any issue with how it works though.
 
yeah, its a weird system alright....

i checked out Winver, and it shows 3GB as its available physical memory...
but in the system properties window, it still shows 18 GB even though its now
overclocked.

and when i check under the performance tab of the Task Manager, it also says
that the available physical memory is 3325 MB....

i know all of this is to do with the virtual side of vista... but about 2
weeks ago, i updated the BIOS to try and unlock the CPU multiplier so i could
overclock my system further, and as soon as i did that, Vista recognized that
there was 4 GB of RAM present and i think it was actually using all of it...

its a shame that i couldn't keep the system stable as the multiplier was
jumping between 6x and 8x so i had to go back to my old BIOS to stabilize the
system...
 
eriche said:
yeah, its a weird system alright....

i checked out Winver, and it shows 3GB as its available physical memory...
but in the system properties window, it still shows 18 GB even though its
now
overclocked.

and when i check under the performance tab of the Task Manager, it also
says
that the available physical memory is 3325 MB....

i know all of this is to do with the virtual side of vista... but about 2
weeks ago, i updated the BIOS to try and unlock the CPU multiplier so i
could
overclock my system further, and as soon as i did that, Vista recognized
that
there was 4 GB of RAM present and i think it was actually using all of
it...

its a shame that i couldn't keep the system stable as the multiplier was
jumping between 6x and 8x so i had to go back to my old BIOS to stabilize
the
system...
Click to expand...

Vista x86 SP1 will report 4GB of INSTALLED ram on the system info page but
will not use any more than what winver is reporting. The difference between
the installed ram reported and the memory available reported by memver is
the space reserved by the BIOS for memory-mapped IO for various devices like
your video card, etc. Windows may not be using this space but the computer
is.
 
ok... i understand how it only shows 3GB as its physical memory... but the
issue is still there...

it still says that there is 18 GB of RAM installed... does anyone know how
to fix it??
 
eriche said:
ok... i understand how it only shows 3GB as its physical memory... but the
issue is still there...

it still says that there is 18 GB of RAM installed... does anyone know how
to fix it??
Click to expand...


Having no idea who manufactured the motherboard, I have no clue about where
to start researching it.
 
eriche said:
my motherboard is a Foxconn P9657AA-8EKRS2H

if u need to get onto their site, it is:

www.foxconnchannel.com
Click to expand...


Actually I don't need to get into the site, but you do. I tried to access
the forum link on the Support tab without success. The link to the English
forum appears to be broken so use the contact link on the Support tab to
find out where on the site you can get info and why the forum link is
returning an error.
 
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