My vista 32bit 4gb ram story

Well.....I wasnt pleased with vista32 saying I had 4gm ram installed, 2.35gb total and 1.75gb available. I read about vista, hardware resources and ram. I decided to physically remove a sony real-time mpeg encoder PCI card (that I dont use) and low and behold.....system information was showing 4gb installed, total 3gb and 2.4gb available.
So I decided to test some other options. I have a NVidia Geforce 8500GT 512mb PCIE card installed . I dont have onboard video so I swapped out the 8500 card with an older NVidia 128mb PCIE card and system information showed 4gb installed, 3.25gb total and 2.7gb available. I wanted to see how much further i could go so I disconnected my external hard drive, disconnected my internal dvd drive, removed my 56k modem (dont ask) and disconnected my webcam. None of these had any effect.

I never quite got to the 3.5gb available which seems to be the norm. I figured it was reserved to my onboard digital audio w/ 2 spdif outputs or motherboard that has a Pentium Quad core processor. I realized that it seems my 4gb were being utilized somehow so I was satisfied with that.

Thats my story.....later

ps. i put back the 8500 gt card if your wondering!