only 3 gbs usable with windows 7

D

d3stiNy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 1, 2003
Messages
170
So I got a new computer with 6 gbs of RAM but windows 7 says that 3 gbs is usable. I looked online quick and saw that I might need to get windows 7 64bit... Is this true? Should I get the 64 bit windows so that all 6 gbs get used?


Thanks in advance
 
The reason 32-bit OS's are limited to 4GB's is because they can only address 2*32(4,294,967,296) bytes of ram. It's from a hardware limit back when 32bit cpus were all that was used. With the new 64bit cpus out, there is virtually no limit to the ram you can use other than what your motherboard supports.

Here's a link to help explain it better than I could. http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
 
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SicKlown42012 said:
The reason 32-bit OS's are limited to 4GB's is because they can only address 2*32(4,294,967,296) bytes of ram. It's from a hardware limit back when 32bit cpus were all that was used. With the new 64bit cpus out, there is virtually no limit to the ram you can use other than what your motherboard supports.

Here's a link to help explain it better than I could. http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
Click to expand...

2^32 hehe. And yes, its all about the number of bits. on a 64 bit system, you could have 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616)bytes of ram, which is more than any mobo in the forseeable future will ever be able to use.
 
hehe, big difference between 2*32 and 2^32, lol. :p (64 vs 4294967296)
 
wait, you have an i7 rig, and have been on these forums for 6 years and you didnt know about the 32bit limit?

either way, im jealous of your rig :p and good move on going to win7, its great.
 
MrCoffee said:
2^32 hehe. And yes, its all about the number of bits. on a 64 bit system, you could have 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616)bytes of ram, which is more than any mobo in the forseeable future will ever be able to use.
Click to expand...

I vaguely remember Bill Gates saying that a computer will never need more then 64k of ram. I may be wrong on the bill gates part, but I know that someone importment said it.

Also the reason your only seeing 3gigs and not 4 is because it is the total amount of memory "addresses" which is limited, the addresses are also used by all the other memory in your computer, which includes any memory on your video card, bios and other hardware.

One wonders how long it will take to reach 18 Zettabytes of ram? hopefully by then we will have a 128 bit os.......
 
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Diablo2K said:
I vaguely remember Bill Gates saying that a computer will never need more then 64k of ram. I may be wrong on the bill gates part, but I know that someone importment said it.

Also the reason your only seeing 3gigs and not 4 is because it is the total amount of memory "addresses" which is limited, the addresses are also used by all the other memory in your computer, which includes any memory on your video card, bios and other hardware.

One wonders how long it will take to reach 18 Zettabytes of ram? hopefully by then we will have a 128 bit os.......
Click to expand...

Everyone says Bill Gates said it [the 640k thing] but he never said it. He has been interviewed and denied saying it, saying he "always believed there would never be enough ram and all software engineers believe this" and no one can find any sort of context for the statement, like did he say it to a reporter or at a stock meeting or on tv or what, it's just a null quote, and likely never happened. It's ironic, because the 640k limitation of old DOS PCs was actually due to IBM choosing the 16-bit intel cpu [the 8086/8088] for their original IBM PC, and there was nothing MS could have done to have prevented it.

Here is some stuff from wikiquote:
  • 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
    • Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark. Also see the 1989 and 1993 remarks above.
I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.
Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement — I said the opposite of that.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
 
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d3stiNy said:
Thats interesting. Any reason as to why windows was designed that way?
Click to expand...

It's not just Windows. Any 32-bit OS has the same issue, as the virtual memory space of a 32-bit OS can only be 4 GB in size and any hardware devices, including the BIOS, SATA controllers and videocard plus its VRAM are mapped onto this memory space, all reducing the number of bytes can be addressed of the system RAM. Since VRAM is the largest, using multiple 1 GB videocards can take up most of the memory space, leaving only a palty 2 GB or so for system RAM. That's why you see the available memory differ on 32-bit OSs when 4+ GB is installed differ between ~2.4 GB all the way up to ~3.2 GB.
 
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