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Maximum usable memory for 32-bit Win 7
Hi,
I used to have Vista (32-bit) on the machine, 4 GB RAM installed on the motherboard. Vista was able to allocate around 3.00 GB for itself, with a videocard that had 256 megs of RAM on it.
As my old video card busted, I changed it into Club3D's Geforce GTS 250 with 1 GB of memory, and naturally didn't take a look how much Vista had "available memory" after that. Got the Windows 7 update on Vista, and now I'm seeing in the system :
Memory : 4,00 GB (2,00 GB usable)
I took a look at Task Manager, and it also shows 2048 MB as available memory. Looking at the videocard's specs, I can see that it has 1024 MB of dedicated video memory, and shared system memory 767 MB.
Knowing that the maximum memory 32-bit Win is able to map is 4 GB, still the math doesn't seem to work for me. 2 GB for OS + 1 GB for the video adapter makes a total of 3 GB. If the shared memory isn't in the 2 GB Windows 7 shows as available, then we'd have 2 GB + 1 GB + 0,7 GB = 3,7 GB which starts to sound more reasonable.
For fact, I know that I have memory re-mapping on in BIOS, and BIOS check says 4096 MB of memory installed. The motherboard in question is ASUS P5B. Should I somehow be able to get Windows to use 3 GB of the 4 GBs installed, or is the latter math part right, and the system is already using all that it can?
-Ex
Last edited by Ex Ante; 23 Oct 2010 at 08:06. Reason: Improving typesetting ;-)