Only 2.75GB Useable RAM...

[PowerPie5000]

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone here can help me with a slightly irritating issue! I upgraded a friends OS from Windows XP to Windows 7 64-bit and also added an extra 2GB RAM (making the total 4GB). The system BIOS detects all 4GB perfectly fine and Windows 7 can see 4GB, but it shows up as only 2.75GB useable . I've tried checking/unchecking the max mem option in msconfig with no luck. I also can't see any memory remapping options in the BIOS setup and the PC has a dedicated GPU.

It's an old Compaq SR1000 series PC (SR1639UK) with the following specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ cpu (2.2ghZ)
4GB PC3200 DDR RAM (4x1GB)
Dedicated 512MB Geforce 210 GPU (PCIe)
250GB SATA HDD
DVD/RW optical drive (IDE)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The resource meter shows 1282MB is apparently reserved for hardware which seems a bit strange!

Any help is much appreciated! Cheers

 

[PowerPie5000]

The resource meter shows 1282MB is apparently reserved for hardware which seems a bit strange!

that's your issue

are you reserving any large pagefile?

Not that i know of and it was a clean Win 7 install with all the updates applied and device drivers installed. Nothing has been manually changed.

There's no option for enabling or disabling the onboard GPU and it was never used in the first place. The system originally came with a Geforce 6200 card installed when it was first bought years ago. I'd also go the Linux route, but she's never used Linux before. The computer is mainly used for web browsing and for her son to do his school work on.

My own PC shows 8GB total (all useable) and 19MB reserved for hardware. That's with only 8GB installed and a dedicated R9 280X GPU.

 

[PowerPie5000]

Look in Device Manager and see if an onboard GPU is shown there.

If there is one then right click and disable it.

Device manager only shows the Geforce 210 card.

Check this.

I had a look at this, but 1282MB reserved by either the BIOS or device drivers seems a bit steep!

The motherboard is an oem MSI board. The model is MS-7184 (Amethyst-M)... It has the latest bios that i could find which is version 3.47.

 

[PowerPie5000]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. It turns out the Geforce 210 card has 512MB dedicated VRAM and is advertised as 1GB with Turbocache enabled (can't see any way of disabling it). It still doesn't explain why a whole 1282MB of RAM is reserved by the system though .

Just to clarify... There are no memory remapping options, shared video memory options or onboard GPU options in the BIOS. This PC is quite old and she only uses it for web browsing and for her sons school work. It can barely run Windows 7 x64 with it's current RAM issue! I'm actually thinking about ditching this old thing and getting her an ex-corporate Dell, HP or similar machine with a quad core chip. Can pick them up cheap enough and even the old venerable Q6600 would run circles around this thing .

 

[PowerPie5000]

That PC is 2005 vintage. It may be hardware limited to 4 GB despite the 64 bit OS.

The maximum installable RAM is 4GB. The BIOS can see all 4GB (1GB in each slot)... It still doesn't explain why Windows can only use 2.75GB out of the 4GB though. The rest is wasted

If it's barely usable there is something else going wrong, windows 7 will run on 2.75GB fairly happily for her uses (Obviously not ideal though, still worth trying to free some of that reserved area!)

Not really sure what the best route to go would be on working out why it's not running well though

I think there's quite a bit of file swapping going on. The HDD is constantly thrashing no matter what she's doing and she can't open many things at once without it slowing to a crawl. Maybe it would have been better to go with the 32-bit version of Windows 7, but it's too late now.