I find your lack of faith in 32-bit systems disturbing.
I’m no expert in it either by the way. But I found a nice post on this common problem plaguing non-techies and the geeky.
Since the plummeting of prices of DDR2 RAM (last I checked, it’s $15 for a 1GB stick, $25 for 2GB), a lot of people have moved to using 4GB of RAM. I don’t recommend it, but it does makes running multiple applications superb! And Vista (64-bit) does seem more responsive than XP (32 bit) if given such a disgusting amount of RAM for it to feed on.
Problem statement:
I just bought a system with 4GB of physical RAM in it. The BIOS posts 4GB, but Windows tells me that I have anywhere from 2.75 – 3.5GB of RAM. Where is the rest of my RAM?Summary:
If you are running 32-bit Windows, you must live with it. You will not ever see all 4GB of RAM you’ve paid for.If you are running 64-bit Windows, you may have to live with it. Depending on your motherboard’s chipset, your system may support memory remapping. If so, you will be able to use all 4GB of RAM.
The way I understand it, it boils down to the ability of an operating system to provide address space. Addresses is akin to your home address. It describes the location of a piece of data. 32-bit systems can provide 2³² addresses, or 4,294,967,296 addresses. The problem arises when you have 4GB of RAM that requires addresses, but other hardware components require it too, most notably the graphics card. Graphics usually has its own memory for it to use (onboard graphics use a portion of your RAM, usually configured in BIOS), so it too requires addresses. So in the end, Windows will allocate a portion of address for graphics and other components, and give the rest to your RAM. So in the end, a 32-bit flavour of Windows will only see 2.7-3.5GB out of the 4GB.
Do note that this is a very simplistic explanation that may be a bit skewed. For a more detailed and technical reason, do click on the link below.
