Vista stole 1gig of 4gig? What!?

I am running Vista Home Premium 32 Bit. I originally had 2gig, but upgraded to 4gig this morning. However, Vista seems to have taken 1 whole gig of ram, with the little memory/cpu meter showing just 3069mb availible. Thefore, I have double checked with CPU-Z, and checked Bios, both of which are showing 4gb available. Has Vista taken 1gig for any reason, or have I done something wrong?

Help is much appreciated:)

Its taken 1gig + 30% from processes. Bios says its fine so surely thats enough? I read on the Crucial website where I got the ram from which said that Vista may take 0.5gb before processes, but not 1gig + 30%.ringoflight

its not using 1 gig, he is saying that he has installed 4gb but it is only showing 3gb

What is the minimum amount of RAM that Vista Home Premium will work with?

1GB of DDR2 533 is OK? It will need at least 2GB?zenzen

[QUOTE="zenzen"]What is the minimum amount of RAM that Vista Home Premium will work with?

1GB of DDR2 533 is OK? It will need at least 2GB?zenzen

for gaming, you need 2 gigs. the minimum is 1 gig, but vista usually uses 500 MB on just idle, so 2 gigs is basically required for gaming

This is what I mean

As you can see, I only have 3069mb available.

This is what I mean

As you can see, I only have 3069mb available.

ringoflight

As I said 32 bit operating systems CAN ONLY READ 4 gigs of ram, subtracted by your gpu, which is around 2.75 gigs of ram that is normal, when I was on xp 32 bit, with 4 gigs of ram it showed 2.75 gigs of ram in that panel. Go grab xp 64 bit or vista 64 bit if you want to see all your memory.

[QUOTE="ringoflight"]

This is what I mean

As you can see, I only have 3069mb available.

MondoCool

As I said 32 bit operating systems CAN ONLY READ 4 gigs of ram, subtracted by your gpu, which is around 2.75 gigs of ram that is normal, when I was on xp 32 bit, with 4 gigs of ram it showed 2.75 gigs of ram in that panel. Go grab xp 64 bit or vista 64 bit if you want to see all your memory.

its more like subtact from youre GPU and what youre PC uses on youre HDD for ram and like memory that youre bios uses (some other stuff to but i cant remember)

Ok, surely it would have been more reassuring to show that I have 4gb availible, and then telling me it plans on using 1 gig before everything else.

Anyway, thanks for your help!

Ok, surely it would have been more reassuring to show that I have 4gb availible, and then telling me it plans on using 1 gig before everything else.ringoflight

so, either get rid of the extra 2GB of memory you put in it and attempt to sell it, or upgrade to the 64 bit version of windows vista

Hey I had the same problem!! But don't fret, what Vista 32 bit edition actually does is it adds that RAM to the Video card. A bit like virtual memory, run dxdiag and check your total approximate memory and you should fine that its more then ur video cards norm. This is good because Vista is adding system memory to the video card, this allocation means that if you have bought this RAM for games you'll get better performance. On XP the graphics card memorywould overwrite system memory in mapping itself and that would be a big user of system memory. With Vista its quite dynamic in that that memory is used in games, so ur card has 1GB of RAM instead of 320mb!

If you just want to see the whole 4GB you could do the workaround and remap memory through BIOS , don't know where or how to do this in your motherboard as its different on each brand. Microsofts website www.support.microsoft.com/kb/929605has all the details.

Alternatively if your computer supports the 64bit edition of vista then get that, you can order it and you only have to pay for the shipping, provided that you have a retail version of Vista.

32 bit operating systems can only read at most 3GB of memory. In order to get the full 4GB usable, you'll have to upgrade to the 64 bit version353535355353535

This is the answer you are looking for.

CLICKY!

[QUOTE="353535355353535"]32 bit operating systems can only read at most 3GB of memory. In order to get the full 4GB usable, you'll have to upgrade to the 64 bit versionzenzen

usually they give you both the 32 and 64 bit version discs

You have 32 bit, 32 bit adresses 4 gigs of ram. Which is also taken by your grapihcs card. Xp and vista limit it around 2.75 gigs of ram. Thisis completely natural unless you want xp 64 bit or vista x64.MondoCool

QFT

If you want to actually use 4GB of RAM you will need to install Windows Vista x64 or an earlier 64-bit OS.

So, is it better to stick with Windows XP (Service Pack 2) then? I can only afford 2 Gigs of RAM, and I don't want half of it being hogged by the operating system. Plus I heard that there are no programs that are compatible with Vista right now.DSPX

Naw Vista is fine. People are more used to XP so there is no doubt that for most people XP makes the most sense. I for one have had little to no trouble with Vista. It runs pretty much flawless for me.

[QUOTE="DSPX"]So, is it better to stick with Windows XP (Service Pack 2) then? I can only afford 2 Gigs of RAM, and I don't want half of it being hogged by the operating system. Plus I heard that there are no programs that are compatible with Vista right now.MadExponent

Naw Vista is fine. People are more used to XP so there is no doubt that for most people XP makes the most sense. I for one have had little to no trouble with Vista. It runs pretty much flawless for me.

So, if I get a Dual Core processor at 2.66 GHz/ 2 Gigs of RAM / 256 MB GeForce 8600GTS ,is that good enough to do heavy multi-tasking and video editing while running Vista? Should I get 4 Gigs of RAM?

[QUOTE="MadExponent"]

[QUOTE="DSPX"]So, is it better to stick with Windows XP (Service Pack 2) then? I can only afford 2 Gigs of RAM, and I don't want half of it being hogged by the operating system. Plus I heard that there are no programs that are compatible with Vista right now.DSPX

Naw Vista is fine. People are more used to XP so there is no doubt that for most people XP makes the most sense. I for one have had little to no trouble with Vista. It runs pretty much flawless for me.

So, if I get a Dual Core processor at 2.66 GHz/ 2 Gigs of RAM / 256 MB GeForce 8600GTS ,is that good enough to do heavy multi-tasking and video editing while running Vista? Should I get 4 Gigs of RAM?

For video editing I'd say you'd want at least 4GB of RAM. You are also going to want Vista x64 instead of 32-bit. Do you do video editing for a living. If so I'd say get a Q6600 for the extra 2 cores.

The maximum addressable amount of memory in a 32-bit system is 4GB's.

However, what Windows does is that because Microsoft hadn't expected of anyone making a system with 4GB's of system RAM up until they had since migrated to 64-bit, at least 512MB of the very last section of addressable memory is then reserved for the I/O addresses used for device drivers and the like. In addition, Windows also caches a set of addresses to the video memory that you use, so if you have a 512MB video card, you lose another 512MB of RAM because its memory addresses are stored on system RAM so that the OS can actually interface and feed it data.

There are things to help, such as attempting to enable PAE in the OS if you have a 64-bit capable CPU; with that, theoretically what happens is that the first 512MB or so after that first 4GB's of RAM instead are then given to allow hardware addressing of the I/O addresses and caching bit.

Or at least, that's how it is supposed to execute. The reality is that most hardware drivers simply can't handle anything larger than a 32-bit memory address, period. So on the interest of stability, I believe it doesn't work anymore if it's a driver that can't handle said types of addressing.

[QUOTE="DSPX"]So, is it better to stick with Windows XP (Service Pack 2) then? I can only afford 2 Gigs of RAM, and I don't want half of it being hogged by the operating system. Plus I heard that there are no programs that are compatible with Vista right now.MadExponent

Naw Vista is fine. People are more used to XP so there is no doubt that for most people XP makes the most sense. I for one have had little to no trouble with Vista. It runs pretty much flawless for me.

of course vista is fine for you. damn man look at your specs!

leelee