ram

[Guest]

anyone can tell me why only 3 out of my 4 g of RAM are recognized. Is there
a restriction on RAM like xp might have had

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

Pretty much it's a 32bit OS restriction more than a XP restriction. Sounds
like you'll want the 64 bit edition of Vista

 

[Rock]

anyone can tell me why only 3 out of my 4 g of RAM are recognized. Is
there
a restriction on RAM like xp might have had

A certain amount of RAM is used by the system and hardware. How much
depends on the specific hardware. All of it can be used but not all is
accessible to the user. It is the same in XP as Vista in this respect.

 

[Bill Thomas]

go into your bios, enable memory hole option. That should show you all
4 gigs but windows will still reserve some for hardware addresses.

 

[Guest]

ok thats not going to solve your issues
the BIOS setting memory hole at 15M-16M is only for legacy software and
actualy removes 1 MB after 15MB and before 16MB hence the "hole" at 15
through 16.
why we used that is when old systems ran programs that could not run with 16
or more MB of ram due to software limitations.
ok from what it sounds like your chipset is the prime limitation on how much
ram you can actualy address. some chipsets have less than what you can
physicly put in your system.
also xp and vista alike have 32 bit addressing, which means you can only
address 4-8 GB's of ram Vs 128 GB's of ram of 64 bit addressing
BUT IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR CHIPSET.