4gb ram installed but 2.75gb useable?

this key is faded out cant see any of it. sounds like too much trouble to bother trying to get 64 bit on here. more work than Im willing to do. lol.

I believe the extra restriction is I need to be in MEA for activation to occur? It is the case for my retail licenses anyway.

macgig said:

this key is faded out cant see any of it. sounds like too much trouble to bother trying to get 64 bit on here. more work than Im willing to do. lol.

Then be sure to apply the optimizations and other suggestions in Clean Up Factory Bloatware
which always gives much better performance, especially for Compaq/HP which have the worst load of throttling, corrupting bloatware in the industry.

In particular one thing I make sure of with less than 4gb RAM and especially in your case with so much RAM apportioned to display, is to edit Visual Effects of burdensome fading, sliding, dragging window intact and selection rectangle. These hog and bog resources. That step is also in Optimize Windows 7 - Windows 7 Forums however I would not uncheck the last box for Use Visual Styles as it turns it into Win2000 ugly for no appreciable performance gain.

good tips. i've been working on those... and tweaking the visual effects to get the best performance I can out of it. yes i've noticed if I uncheck all the boxes for visual styles it gets pretty ugly.

We've long said here that turning off Aero glass gives no appreciable performance gain, and I've never understood those who willingly choose the Win2000 government file cabinet ugly when Windows 7 is elegant by comparison. It often annoys them when I ask but want to make sure they know they're not saving any resources because that is most often the reason they give. What I really want to ask is if they appreciate anything that's beautiful.

Windows 7 beauty is not carried over into its successors so may be once-in-a-lifetime. The color flames at startup alone are cinematic.