4gb ram reading as 3gb on dxdiag ??

[franciscastelino]

Hi my Windows system shows 4gb ram but on dxdiag its only 3gb ?? why is tht.
Just would like to know is it 3gb ram tht i have or 4gb but only 3gbis being used .
its a Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit Below are the print screens of both Performance Information and DXDIAG.

Thanks

 

[franciscastelino]

sorry its a 32bit

 

[franciscastelino]

Sorry for annoying but i am new to this . How do i post a picture of the problem . I have removed a prntscrn and saved it as a jpg

 

[king smp]

http://ask-leo.com/why_doesnt_windows_show_all_4gigabytes_of_memory_i_have_installed.html

32-bit OSes are limited in how much memory they can "see"
the above link explains it

 

[franciscastelino]

aah k . thanks but just one more thing .

So it does show only 3gb but it is using the 4b right ?? or cause of 32bit OS the 1gb is just not being used ?

 

[king smp]

essentially your losing about 750 mb of ram
i just installed 4gb and now I have to upgrade to
Win7 64-bit to use the 750mb

 

[franciscastelino]

crap . thanks so much for the info. will Upgrade it to a 64bit OS

 

[king smp]

it is not actually able to address that ram because hardware has taken
up that address space for the last 750mb

 

[RetiredChief]

Not a big diff in performance between 32bit win vs 64 Bit win with 4 gigs installed.
If planning on going above 4 gigs the 64 bit a MUST.
I always go with/upgrade to 4 gigs, But only upgraded one computer to 64 Bit, which I latter increased ram to 12 Gigs and am planning on going to 16 gigs

All systems use a SSD except the Back-up desktop which has two pair of Raid0 HDDs.
Laptop 1, upgraded 2 -> 4 Gigs, stayed with 32 Bit (upg vista -> win7)
Laptop 2, upgraded 3->4gigs, stayed with 32 Bit (upg vista->win7
Backup Desktop 4 gigs, Daul boot Vista and XP, both 32 bit
Primary Desktop, win 7 64 bit. started with 4 gigs -> 8gigs, -> 12 gigs.

Not a gamer, and for much of my work, they all perform about the same (Back-up slower on boot do to no SSD)

 

[king smp]

It is the point that I paid for 4b darn it and I want it to show!
And anyway every few months I find some excuse or some how
crash my OS so I have to reinstall

I spend most of my time installing Windows for my customers
so reinstalling isnt a big deal

and it is cool to say you run Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit LOL

 

[king smp]

How much faster is SSD Chief?
On my Barracuda 7200 rpm Win7 boots in about 40-50 seconds to usable desktop and shuts down easily under 20 seconds
And I have a few programs starting with windows (Icon dock and system monitor)
so I could shave about 10 seconds if I remove startups

If a ssd can get me to a usable desktop in 10 seconds or less
I am going to have to start saving up!

 

[RetiredChief]

Time from completion of BIOS to opening a program, about 20 Sec.
Have not really timed my laptops, but boot time was noticably faster.
After boot, my only real advantage is in program installs as I do not run an real disk intensive progams. Use to backup a fair number of DVDs, But don't think I want to use the SSD for that. Plan on using a ramdisk in the near future - Performance blows an SSD out of the water (tried a 3 gig ramdrive).

When they improve on the SATA III SSDs you just may see a 10 Sec boot time (Excluding post)

 

[king smp]

I think I heard when M$ was demonstrating Win7 they had a machine do it in 7 secs
not sure if that is exact but I can believe it

Regards to OP thread
I have been reading about Physical Address Extension (PAE) which
supposedly in a 32bit OS lets it address 4gb but in practice
i dont think it really works
My PAE is enabled with a PAE processor and I think only
programs coded to address over the 32-bit space can use it.

Ii is kind of silly of me to worry about 750mb because
even with a 1g Virtual Machine open,MSoutlook,different monitoring programs,3 IE8 windows,DVDFlick encoding and burning disk,streaming internet radio I still have about a 1gb free and that is the hardest I really push my system

 

[RetiredChief]

King smp
Agree with comments on PAE.

On memory, I've had no problems of running out of memory and having high swap file request on by 32 bits systems with 4 gigs of ram. Also in win 7 (I believe) windows will "grab" more memory than it needs, but if a program needs it it can Relinquish some of it, so available memory may be higher. On that same token their are some programs that are a real memory hog and some programs that do not release all the memory they were using when you exit the program (Memory leak).

 

[king smp]

i found that leaving MSOutlook open will slowly use more and more ram (memory leak)
I deal with alot of emails so I usually leave Outlook open but about
once or twice a day I restart the computer
i did go deep in options and remove some add-ons and that helped

 

[king smp]

If I got it right
Windows 7 uses super prefetch (prefetch goes back to at least win xp)
if you are always using IE for example it will loaded into ram
but when you use some other program that needs the memory
it will unload IE