Under reporting of installed memory

[Guest]

I have Vista Ultimate 32 bit with 4 Gig RAM, but 2047 KB is shown.

What is worse is that my pc is rated with the reduced RAM and given a 5.6
score.

My question: Where did the other 2 GB of RAM go? How will Vista recognize
whats on my motherboard and not short change the pc.

Thank you and warmest regards,

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

Oh, if you had only search the group for this answer. Actually, you should
still do a search as this question has been answered alot and in some very
good detail

Short answer is, 32bit windows (any version) only supports up to 4GB, there
is also some varibles in what the motherboard reports and such. In order to
properly access 4GB, you would need a 64bit version of windows XP or Vista.

Also, depending on your board, running 4x1Gb causes the memory timings to
run at 2T instead of 1T. on my system that cost me almost 1GB of throughput
speed (5804MB/s vs 4909MB/s) So ideally, you would want to run only 2
sticks. I find this to be more true on AMD boards then Intel boards. I only
lose about 400MB/s when I'm running 4 sticks on a older D875P based board.

A firmware update might help with the way you mobo reports the ram, and in
turn helps windows.I have an Abit K8N Ultra and it will correctly report 3GB
of ram. I don't have any more 2x1GB sticks, so I can't see how it reports
4GB

 

[Guest]

Thank you for the comments. In a 32 bit environment, I think the trick is to
add a line in the "boot.ini" file thus: "/PAE" and the 4GB memory will show
up (at least, that's what I read with the standard "F1" approach.)

The trick now is to find the boot.ini file in Vista.

The under reporting of RAM is a serious flaw as the pc's performance index
is indexed, based on the reduced RAM. I believe it is not a case of "never
mind, you do not see it, but it is there and working for you..."

This flaw will put off potential individual as well as corporate users and
companies who manufacture RAM. I wish Microsoft can come up with a work
around pretty soon and I feel shortchanged by the public release of what was
touted as a "major work" that contains of an oversight that directly affects
my pc's performance.

Thanks for reading my two cents' worth...Cheers!

 

[Dale \Mad_Murdock\ White]

There is a program called vistabootpro that allows you to set the PAE
option. I'm sure you could do it with the BCEDIT, it's just easier to have a
GUI do it for you. The program is free

http://www.vistabootpro.org/