RAM not accessible???

[quintonpereira]

Before I installed Windows 7, I had taken out my 2 GB RAM (coz my friend wanted it).
Later on when I got it back, it says that there's 4GB RAM, but only 1.87 GB is usable.
Even the BIOS shows 4 GB RAM.

Can anybody help me out?

 

[zigzag3143]

Before I installed Windows 7, I had taken out my 2 GB RAM (coz my friend wanted it).
Later on when I got it back, it says that there's 4GB RAM, but only 1.87 GB is usable.
Even the BIOS shows 4 GB RAM.

Can anybody help me out?

Hi and welcome

32 bit windows can see 4 gigs but can only access ~3,3gigs. Windows takes half that and puts it in cache to speed up applications launch faster etc.

Its normal, and the way win 7 is supposed to work

Ken J+

 

[fseal]

You don't by any chance have 2 one gig video cards in your machine do you?

Some motherboards can remap the video ram outside the 4 gig, but a lot can't, or will only do it for one video card.

If you do NOT have two 1 gig video cards installed, then something else is going on. Normally you should have from 3-3.5 gig free (without memory remapping).

If you want to see what memory is being usd for what, go to the Task Manager then Performance, then Resource Monitor button, then the Memory tab. There will be a colorful little bargrah showing your memory usage. Anything that is grey is hardware stomping on your 4 gig.

Example screen cap here: http://community.winsupersite.com/b...dows-7-factoid-improved-resource-monitor.aspx

 

[quintonpereira]

I have a XFX 9600GT 512 MB. But i just have one.
Why is more than 2GB reserved???
And how do I get it back?
This is a matter of real concern for me!

 

[fseal]

Wow, ok yeah that is Not Right [tm]...

There should be 512k+ a little but so maybe 600k total.

Found this on the net:
Why is windows 7 marking all my extra RAM as "hardware reserved"? - Super User

Try out the second answer down... THough reading the comments someone else had a bad experience with it :/

 

[quintonpereira]

there still seems to be no solution!
w7 just gobbled up 2183MB of precious RAM!!!

 

[fseal]

It has to be a configuration of some kind, like the boot config suggestion in that link I posted. Some people had put 8 gig in their machine and only saw 2 gig free because some manufacturer had set the boot config to allow only 2 gig of ram. (Probably some scam to send the computer back to have it upgraded or something)

 

[quintonpereira]

okay so hows bout this:
i actually reinstalled windows7 (coz my system kept hanging for some reason, even though i have a frickin quad core and 4GB RAM), previously i HAD 3GB usable. i then i took out 1 2GB RAM coz i thot dat was the problem.
i reinstalled windows 7 with just 2GB. i then put the 2GB back, and now its showin just 1.87GB usable......

i tried the memory diagnostic thingy, but it showed no errors.

i tried the msconfig idea and that too didnt work

should i update the BIOS???

 

[fseal]

If there is a BIOS update for you board which looks like it is newer than atleast Vista then that might help. The change log or whatever for the BIOS may list some fixes for Vista or W7 if they are on the ball.

 

[quintonpereira]

okay so i was terribly wrong about everything.....
i took out EVERYTHING and put it back piece by piece (actually a really good friend did the whole thing!)
fixed everything back, 1 RAM chip at a time. and everything works!
he said coz both ends didnt clip on simultaneously, and i had to manually clip the chips in, dat was the problem.

a big thanks anyways to all that helped!

 

[ccatlett1984]

yes, seating ram can be a pain on some computers.

 

[fseal]

I also ran into a weird situation on my machine. It was under W7 but that probably didn't make any difference.

I have 4 sticks in two banks, all exactly the same modules. During testing (was having the HD light freeze problem) I took two sticks out. No change. Swapped sticks. No change, then put the other two sticks back in and the machine would randomly crash hard and often. The sticks were in reversed banks to the way they had been but properly installed. I took the sticks out and swappend the pairs back into their original banks and had no more crashing problems... (Still had the HD freeze but figured thatout later).

As google recently reported, flakey ram behavior is far FAR more common than anyone previously thought. Like at least an order of magnitude worse (10 times as many problems caused by intermittant or bad ram than anyone thought).