]Changed my CMOS battery and now my usable memory has decreased by 512MB and shared memory has increased by 512MB. All the BIOS setting haven't changed. Did a search of this site and tried suggested BIOS changes (decrease video memory) and still no luck. How do I get my usable memory back?
This use to say 3.5 usable.
Have a good look through the bios for a setting called "Memory hole remapping" or something similar and if it is disabled, enable it.
Changing the battery can and usually will cause the bios to reset, and that is one setting that depending on the motherboard in most cases is set to disabled and needs to be enabled to use/see more than 4 GB of ram in 64 bit.
I'm afraid the BIOS on this Dell is pretty limited. No such memory hole setting in the BIOS. Only memory related is the video memory size setting, which can be set to 16, 32, 64, 128, 256.
Just realized that you are running 32 bit Windows. One thing I can tell you is that your video card (8500 GT) has its own memory on it and uses/takes nothing from system ram. This should help explain 4 GB on 32 bit,
Coding Horror: Dude, Where's My 4 Gigabytes of RAM?
In your case right off the bat you are going to lose 512 MB due to the video card, with the rest of the hardware taking the rest. There is a god possibility that with changing the battery it caused the bios to reset, and enable/re-enable a setting or two for something on the motherboard that was disabled and hence the decrease in available ram.
By chance is the onboard video still enabled even with the video card? If so see if there is the option to disable it, and if not and you haven't already set the memory for it as low as it will go.
Problem solved. Upgraded to Windows 7 64bit and added another 4GB of memory.
Ha yeah
I would have guessed that the problem was related to a built in video controller which you could (and probably had) turned off in the BIOS before the batter change which may have reset your BIOS to defaults.
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