Ram confusion please help

robwalters04

Baseband Member
Messages
30
Location
United Kingdom
Hi guys,
I recently installed 2 extra gbs of ram into my computer but it is saying only 2.75 is available. my laptop is 32 bit.

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 2.75 GB
Available Physical Memory 1.58 GB
Total Virtual Memory 5.71 GB
Available Virtual Memory 4.38 GB
Page File Space 3.04 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

can somebody please help me???

Many thanks
 
32GB only will detect and use a certain amount of total RAM, that's including video RAM as well.

Also in a laptop the videocard may be using system RAM.

Plus how Windows works it uses memory up to make it faster. Free unused RAM is wasted RAM. I noticed when I went from 2GB to 4GB on the same system, used RAM went up. Since laptop hard drives are dead slow you want lots of RAM, with Windows using as much as possible pre-loading OS files. If RAM is needed for applications, memory is flushed to give room for it.
 
Onboard GPU. What that means instead of having dedicated video graphics processor and dedicated video RAM chips, the CPU does the video processing, and system RAM is used as video RAM. So if you have 4GB of RAM, and BIOS is set to 512MB shared graphics, the OS is given 3.5GB of RAM.

Some newer CPU's have half decent GPU's built into the CPU itself so it's not that bad, although it will still use system RAM, which is considerably slower than dedicated video RAM. If you're not a gamer then it doesn't matter.
 
Windows will not say the full 4GB is available to use. If you are running a 32Bit version of Windows it has a maximum 4GB whereas 64bits of can use more than 4GB, If you have 4GB installed it should say 3.60GB usable in your system properties.
 
32bit will show 3.5gig. 64bit will go up to 32gig depending on the bios. Some will go higher.

Rob what laptop is it? Some laptop bios lock down the amount of ram it can use.
 
Last edited:
Yup, 3.5Gb is the max on a 32bit OS, the remaining RAM will probably be shared with your graphics chip, so maybe in your bios there is a setting to alter it, but probably not because laptop bios's tend to be as minimal as humanly possible. The shared memory might be set as a percentage rather than a numerical value.
 
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