Dell vostro 400 core 2 duo windows 7 only 3 gb of memory usable

[ILLKING]

Hello all, I am having an issue with memory on my vostro 400. It is a core 2 duo, windows 7, with E8400 board at 3ghz. I have installed 7 gb of ram and only 3gb is shown as usable when I look in the system menu and go to ram processor and speed ect. In the bios setting I have version 1.0.18 and it shows 7000+ installed and 7000+ available. Any clue on what to do to solve this?

 

[o1die]

Some versions of windows 7 are 32 bit, which has a limit of about 3 gb regardless of how much ram you use.

 

[MajinCry]

A trick you can do, however, is get software to make a ram-disk using the ram that Windows (32bit) won't use, and then use that for your page-file, essentially giving you 7GB (Or, well, 6GB if you have a 1GB GPU / 5GB if you have a 2GB GPU, etc).

It's what I'm going to do once I get myself some pennies to spend on compy parts.

 

[clutchc]

+1^^
32 bit Windows is limited to 3.xxGB memory. 64 bit Windows will allow all your memory to be used as system memory.