Missing ram after upgrade 32bit OS

[rich5315 10]

Ive recently upgraded my new pc with extra ram, it came with a 2gb stick in one of four slots, ive put another 3gb of memory in 3 x 1gb so all the dimm slots are full, windows tells me im currently using 3.3gb of memory the bios is detecting 5gb of memory.the ram i have purchased is correct for my motherboard and each stick is working when tried seperatly. Does anyone have any ideas. ive run a motherboard check on a website which says it will accept 8gb. there are no bios updates for me to do, im running vista home 32 bit, please help

[Eric_Collins 11]

Ive recently upgraded my new pc with extra ram, it came with a 2gb stick in one of four slots, ive put another 3gb of memory in 3 x 1gb so all the dimm slots are full, windows tells me im currently using 3.3gb of memory the bios is detecting 5gb of memory.the ram i have purchased is correct for my motherboard and each stick is working when tried seperatly. Does anyone have any ideas. ive run a motherboard check on a website which says it will accept 8gb. there are no bios updates for me to do, im running vista home 32 bit, please help

 

32bit systems will only see up to 2.25gb although my work pc with XP Pro 32bit can see 3.25gb

 

I had the same thing when upgrading to 4gb, i had to swap my 32bit windows for a 64bit to get the full 4gb

[e912 10]

vista 32 home can only recognise up to 4gb of memory, it will however only show about 3.5gb with the balance hidden for hardware drivers etc. if you go on microsofts vista web site you should be able to get the 64 bit version on dvd as long as you pc has a relevant processor

[Eric_Collins 11]

Please view here on all the posts about it on google land and they will all tell you the same.http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK286&=&q=vista+32bit+4gb+ram&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

[Trickle 10]

You are using windows XP 32 bit. [Edit: <-doh, I'm not reading the first post properly again.]

 

Windows XP can only address 4gb, but graphics card memory and other things use addressing space so it only talks to 3.25 usually. It gets worse than this as XP can only allocate a max of 2 gig to individual applications, so much more than 2.5gb is usually wasted.

[rich5315 10]

thanks chaps, i did hear something along those lines, my cpu will take 64 bit, but would it cost to upgrade it

[Eric_Collins 11]

thanks chaps, i did hear something along those lines, my cpu will take 64 bit, but would it cost to upgrade it

 

what cpu do you have now ?

[rich5315 10]

athlon 9500+ quad, the reason i wanted to upgrade the ram is because the 2gb pc came with, the system was using 1.1 gb just to run

[Eric_Collins 11]

athlon 9500+ quad, the reason i wanted to upgrade the ram is because the 2gb pc came with, the system was using 1.1 gb just to run

 

that is 64bit mate, here look at this . It's your CPU in 32 and 64bit modes

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=998&num=1

[rich5315 10]

it seems that cpu is 64 bit but vista is 32 bit, dont know why pc has 32 bit windows on it.

[alchresearch 214]

Probably for compatibility reasons.

[user10239 10]

Because most retailers are cheap, and won't offer x64 because it's extra price for them.

 

Zero compatibility issues with my Vista x64 so far, the only irritating thing is you cant change tcpip.sys without severely upsetting the system, but they raised limit to ~50 concurrent connections in SP1 so it should be ok.