Yet Another Dumb Question About Vista and Not Getting Full Memory

M

mls1995

Guest
Ok so I bought a F131 Vista PC with 2 Gig of RAM from Maingear and I thought I'd throw some extra RAM in there. I knew going in that I would not get the full 4 gig. I expected to get somewhere aroudn 3 gigs of the 4 gig total because of my dual GTX video cards. Well, I'm only getting 2300 MBs! The full 4 gigs shows up in the Bios so the RAM seems to be ok. I tried the pae switch and it didn't appear to do anything.

Any other suggestions to "reclaim" that missing RAM? If not, does anyone want to buy 1 gig of Corsair PC8500 Ram? My specs are listed below. Thanks in advance for your time!


Maingear F131
Electric Blue Custom Painted Chasis
Translucent Window Side Panel w/ LED Lighting Bundle
1000W Power Supply
EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard (revised quad-core edition)
QX6700 "Quad Core" Core 2 Extreme Edition overclocked to 3.2 GHZ
Custom CPU Water Cooling System
2GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 DDR2-1066 RAM
2 X Western Digital Raptor Enterprise 150GB 10K RPM (RAID 0)
Seagate Barracuda 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB
All-in-One Internal USB 2.0 Flash Card Reader & Writer
20X Dual Layer DVD±RW Drive w/ LightScribe Technology
2x NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX in SLI
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi™ Fatal1ty FPS
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (32-Bit)
 
The 4GB limit refers to all system memory, not just the motherboard's RAM. (In other words, video memory counts against the limit). The only viable option to fully utilize any additional RAM would be to go to x64.
 
i have vista 64 bios shows 4gb and so does cpu-z but on mycomputer it shows 3838mb
 
here's a link to a MS white paper discussing WinXP 64 and it's memory requirements. Very informative (if the link works that is). Click on the link that says "Is_Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition_Right_For_Me"

http://www.google.com/search?q=memo...g.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=lf0&start=10&sa=N

But in case the link does not work, it basically says that XP Pro 64 bit has to be compiled with a special option to use > 2 GB memory. If XP Pro is running in 32 bit, then a parameter needs to be included on the executable command line in the boot.ini file that launches XP Pro. I don't know if Vista is the same (I doubt it, but I don't know), but this is at least informative and should give you some ideas on what to google.
 
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