Bruce said:
In essence then, their is no problem having the 4 gig of ram in the system?
No, not at all.
They have to be matched sets. Before I had 3 gigs in 4 slots matched?
Just make sure that the memory is properly recognized, go in the BIOS
and take a look at the installed memory, in the BIOS the RAM should all
show as being installed even if some of it is unavailable to the
operating system.
Curious where windows is basically using 3+ gig, but the motherboard is
using the rest somewhere,
or just not paying attention to it?
It's an addressing issue, there aren't enough addresses for all the
hardware so some of the RAM just goes unused.
You could think of it with this sort of analogy:
You and a couple of friends decide to build a new town. You plan to
have 4,000 lots just for Residences And Mansions (RAM). Your town
administrator orders exactly 4000 numbered RAM address plates and you
can't order any more of them because there is only one factory and the
guys at the factory can't count above 4000. So you say, "No problem, we
have enough address plates for all the lots..." People come in, they
buy lots, they need a RAM address to use the lots so you start giving
out the numbered plates. All of a sudden you realize something isn't
going too well downtown, none of the buildings have numbers and
everybody is lost trying to find their way around. So you say, "No big
deal, we will use the numbers from the top 4000 on down for the service
buildings down town and the other commercial and industial lots", so the
Town Hall gets address numbers 4000, the Police Station, Fire Department
& Ambulance Station get 3999, 3998, 3997 and so on. That big new
shopping area will have 50 stores so numbers 3900 to 3950 are used for
these stores, and of course there is the hospital, the doctors offices,
the school, the library, the bowling alley, the service station the
night clubs and on and on. So now you suddenly realize that your
amenities and services have used up all the numbers from 3500 to 4000.
No big deal you say, we were overly optimistic anyway and we will never
sell all the RAM lots anyway. People come and they buy lots and they
get numbers and all is well. Until one day people come and they ask for
numbers for the last 500 available Residential and Mansion lots and the
town administrator says: "We have no numbers left so we can't service
your lot, too bad but you can't use the lot, we know its there but
without an address you can't use the lot". So now you know how it
works. But there is one last twist to the story... When all the numbers
are used up the town finds out that it absolutely needs a water
treatment plant and as all lots need numbers to be used they decide to
go down to house number 3499 and rip the number off the house and stick
it on the new water treatment plant and all of a sudden the folks who
built a house on lot 3499 can no longer use it. The neighbours at 3498
are starting to get worried because apparently the town council has
decided that they also need a new club house for the councilors...
John
