WinXP no longer sees 3.25 GB

[moto377]

This is strange - I installed 4GB of Corsair CM2X1024-8500C5D which fills all
4 slots on my motherboard - for the past year or so Win XP under properties
reported 3.25 GB which was fine in light of the 4 GB barrier. Just recently
it started showing 2 GB and I'm not sure what has changed. An 8 hour memtest
shows no memory errors. My BIOS shows 4 GB and so does msinfo32 but dxdiag
shows 2.00 GB.

I'm leaning toward something changing in WinXP since memtest and my BIOS
show 4.00 GB.

What could have changed in WinXP?

 

[Ian D]

This is strange - I installed 4GB of Corsair CM2X1024-8500C5D which fills
all
4 slots on my motherboard - for the past year or so Win XP under
properties
reported 3.25 GB which was fine in light of the 4 GB barrier. Just
recently
it started showing 2 GB and I'm not sure what has changed. An 8 hour
memtest
shows no memory errors. My BIOS shows 4 GB and so does msinfo32 but dxdiag
shows 2.00 GB.

I'm leaning toward something changing in WinXP since memtest and my BIOS
show 4.00 GB.

What could have changed in WinXP?

Did you enable the memory remap feature in your BIOS? I did this to
enable all 4 GB for 64 bit Vista Ultimate, and found that in XP Pro,
Task Manager reported a resulting drop in physical memory from 3 GB
to 2 GB.

What does msinfo32.exe report?

 

[moto377]

Yes, memory remap is enabled. msinfo32 is shows the following:

Total Physical Memory 4,096.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.41 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 3.85 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

Under the "General" tab it shows:

2.25 GHz, 2.00 GB of RAM
Physical Address Extension

It use to report 3.25 GB of RAM, so I don't know what has changed. My BIOS
shows 4 GB of memory, as does memtest...

 

[jorgen]

Yes, memory remap is enabled. msinfo32 is shows the following:

I would start by deactivating that memory remap function. That might help

 

[Ian D]

Yes, memory remap is enabled. msinfo32 is shows the following:

Total Physical Memory 4,096.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.41 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 3.85 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

Under the "General" tab it shows:

2.25 GHz, 2.00 GB of RAM
Physical Address Extension

It use to report 3.25 GB of RAM, so I don't know what has changed. My
BIOS
shows 4 GB of memory, as does memtest...

It's the memory remap which has reduced your virtual memory
space to 2 GB. Undo the memory remap and you should be
back to normal. The memory remap is only for 64 bit OSs.