Hello, I purchased a laptop with vista that only had 1gb of ram, i've
upgraded to 4 gb and it is only seeing 3gb, anybody know what happened to a
whole gig?
All 32-bit versions of Windows (XP as well as Vista), even though they
have a 4GB address space, can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM. That's
because some of that space is used by hardware and not available to
the operating system and applications. The amount you can use varies,
depending on what hardware you have installed, but is usually around
3.1GB.
To see the whole 4GB, you would need to run 64-bit Vista (and that's a
whole different can of worms).
On the other hand, very few people need or can make effective use of
that much RAM. It's unlikely that you would see any difference in
performance between 3GB and 4GB, unless you run particularly
memory-hungry applications.
