Windows 7 64 system says it can't use 4Gb of ram

[squareenix]

Hello,
first post here on the forums, like to say hi to everyone here in the community. Unfortunately my first post is about a problem I have regarding the amount of usable ram in my pc. I formatted my pc today and installed Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate edition, because I want to utilise the 4th Gb of ram in my system. However, once I had installed the system properties said that only 2.44Gb is usable, as you can see in the screenshot below.

http://img691.imageshack.us/i/ramzf.jpg/[img]

As you can see it is a 64 bit os, but the rest of my ram still isn't usable, I have no idea whats going on, i've tried the memory remap function in the BIOS but that cuts down the usable ram to 2.0Gb which is even less. Also I should mention that when I was on 32 bit PAE didn't work either.

Here's my system specs:

Motherboard: Asus P5B
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0Ghz
Graphics Card: Nvidia 8600 GT 512Mb
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
RAM: 4 x 1Gb DDR2 667Mhz sticks

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[fseal]

Can you go to the task manager, then on the performance tab click Resource manager, then the Memory tab and snap shot that screen with the colored memory graph on it?

But also, how old is that motherboard? Some older motherboards don;t work so well with 64 bit. I.e. the "hardware reserved" section of ram can;t be remapped out of the lower 4 gig. If you had 8 gig in there you'd still see the hole at the top of the 4 gig mark.

Might google about that specific MB and 64bit memory issues and see if other people see the same thing.

 

[Desslok]

Download memtest and run it, see if it finds errors with your RAM. Does POST see all 4 gb?

 

[squareenix]

fseal, here is the screenshot you requested, as for my motherboard, it is 3 years old.

http://img265.imageshack.us/i/resourcemonitor.jpg/

desslock, downloading and running memtest overnight, will get back to you with the results. Also I don't think anywhere in the POST mentions how much ram I have.

 

[whs]

Interesting. Some H/W reserved 1600MBs of the RAM of which 770MBs are used. What is your graphics?

 

[squareenix]

My graphics card, if that is what you are referring to whs, is an Nvidia 8600 GT 512Mb.

 

[squareenix]

Bump, also this is what the resource monitor says when I enable memory remapping in the BIOS. The rest of my ram that's unlocked because of the remapping also gets reserved by the hardware. Any ideas guys?

http://img190.imageshack.us/i/resourcemonitor2.jpg/

 

[squareenix]

Just figured it out, after I enabled the remapping I turned off the maximum ram in the msconfig. It now says that 1Mb of ram is hardware reserved.

Imageshack - resourcemonitor3.jpg

 

[whs]

That's more like it. Glad you solved it and thanks for reporting the solution.