3.25G usable out of 4G RAM win7 64-bit

F0ICE said:

nope not a laptop. hp pavilion a1250n

Bad guess!!

motherboard: ms-7184/Amethystm using radeon xpress 200 chipset
CPU: amd athlon x2 3800+ @ 2.0GHz Toledo Socket 939
GPU radeon hd 4350 from gigabyte 512M VRAM PCIE x16
memoryDR PC3200 4x1GB Dual Channel

thats all i can provide right now.

Nevertheless, informative.

I must admit I'm not personally familiar firsthand with any of the key components. Perhaps others who do will comment on your available options or BIOS settings possibilities.

the motherboard and CPU are original to the PC. the motherboard does have an onboard video adapter which is disabled via BIOS.

You're sure?

Did this machine come with XP or Vista installed, and you upgraded to Win7 yourself? Or was it purchased relatively recently with Win7 already on it?

Other than the memory upgrade, have you made any other changes to the original configuration?

i have to get back to you on CPUZ but i can say this right now, when i was using 3GB of RAM that hardware reserved memory reading was around 2MB.

Again, very interesting.

While you're about it, can you also please post screenshots from CPU-Z for all four of the memory slots in the SPD tab.

i will post CPUZ details tomorrow. thanks for the help.

This last comment of yours is interesting... as if something you did when you added that final 1GB of memory is VERY relevant to the story.

Specs on that HP,

HP Pavilion a1250n Desktop PC Product Specifications HP Pavilion a1250n Desktop PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

and yes the motherboard does only support up to 4 GB or ram, probably due to it being the older DDR which pretty much topped out at 1 GB max per stick. The CPU on the other hand, old socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 3800+ does as the memory controller is in the CPU and not on the motherboard.

As for the memory re-map option, there is no reason for it to not be enabled by default whether the option is present or not. Unfortunately in your case I don't think that the option was present to begin with. The motherboard in it, MS-7184 which was made by MSI for HP also has a full retail version, the MSI MS-7093,

MSI USA – Computer, Laptop, Notebook, Desktop, Mainboard, Graphics and more

and from looking through the manual for it, it doesn't have the option either. Now as to whether MSI had the option enabled by default and just not present in the bios I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was off by default with no way of enabling it. Wouldn't be the first socket 939 motherboard I have come across that doesn't have the option in the bios or or any way to enable it.

Basically comes down to what you see for total memory is what you're going to get, at least until such a time as you get a new computer.