RAM not displaying in full in WinXP or WinVista.

Computer Forum CPU, Motherboards and Memory
1

Hi,

To start let me just Say hello as this is my first post on these forums

Here are my system specs.

AMD athlon64 4200+
Abit AN932X w/ 2x - 16x SLi
mushkin DDR2 2gb (2x 1gb) - Corsair twin2x DDR2 2gb (2x 1gb)
74Gb sata WD raptor
250gb sata maxtor
2x BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB
Windows Vista Business

So with that stated, everything is working great I installed vista last night and that is great too. All the games are in fine running condition etc.

On Windows Xp Sp2 , and Vista it only registers 3GB of RAM.

But when I start the computer @ boot up it registers as seeing the full 4GB.

My question is have anyone here ever come across this? And if so any suggestions?

P.S I know the RAM amount is over kill but I figured… why the heck not lol. I had the corsair in another box I wasn’t going to use.

Thanks,

Steve

2

Ok

I believe it’s due to my 32 Bit OS of Vista, and Xp.

3

Yup. It’s an OS limitation. While, yeah, the support is up to 4GB, the OS really doesn’t handle it that well. I don’t remember if there’s actually a patch to address this or not, but it is a known issue.

4

I also found this for vista 32bit addition , I’m going to try it when i get home tonight.

Get 32-bit Vista support 4GB or more

Steps:

  1. Access cmd: Click on the Start Pearl > type cmd in the Search Bar > and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter (this allows you to run cmd in administrative mode)

  2. Type BCDEdit /set PAE forceenable

“BCDEdit is a boot configuration editor for the command line. Using the above command you’ve just enabled Physical Address Extension (PAE) which can address memory larger than 4 GB. ”"

Thanks for the input.

Steve

5

I also found this information off M$

The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed