I've got Vista running and I've just put a further 4 gigs of ram into two of the four slots of my motherboard to give me, in theory, 6 gigs of ram. In windows it tells me there's just over 3 gigs of ram whereas the bios tells me there's the full 6. I've run two memory tests on the ram and it tells me its all okay.
Is vista making a mistake and has anyone else experienced this? And will it only use the RAM it knows about?
2007-11-23 11:59:47 · 2 answers · asked by ndoshaughnessy 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
The 32 bit version of Vista which you probably have can not address more than 4 GiB of RAM.
The upper memory just before the 4 GiB mark is used to provide access to memory on other devices, most notably your graphics card and so that memory becomes addressable to the OS, you're BIOS might be able to remap the memory outside of that hole to above the 4 GiB barrier which would give you the full amount you've got but it'll only work with a 64 bit OS.
2007-11-23 12:20:46 · answer #1 · answered by bestonnet_00 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Vista is counting the unused ram and because vista uses so much ram you only have 3 gigs that aren't being used
2007-11-23 12:04:33 · answer #2 · answered by thejustin_s 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋