Still problems with vista and ram

gazo7000 · 20 Jun 2007 at 21:20

Howdy

I got 4 gb of ram and vista only thinks i got 2. my bios reads 4. i read that 32bit could be the problem. Ive got Intel duo core 2.66 so would changing to 64bit be a problem? i would have thought so but i might be wrong?

anything else could make vista run 4gb ram?

Cheers

Cob · 20 Jun 2007 at 21:43

32bit Vista should see ~3.2gb.

Have you got a memory remapping option in your BIOS that can be changed?

gazo7000 · 20 Jun 2007 at 22:26

went into the bios setup

it came up with:

Total: 4096
Appropriated: 2688
Available: 1408

what do i do?

Cob · 20 Jun 2007 at 22:34

Which motherboard?

Jokester · 20 Jun 2007 at 22:35

Have you got an 8800GTS 640MB?

Jokester

gazo7000 · 20 Jun 2007 at 22:39

i have the ASUS P5W DH deluxe. Got the GeIL 4x 1gb ram cards

gazo7000 · 20 Jun 2007 at 22:40

i have 2x Geforce 7950. the 1gb ones.

Cob · 20 Jun 2007 at 22:48

Go to Advanced > Chipset and set the Memory Remap Feature to Enabled.

gazo7000 · 20 Jun 2007 at 23:03

is that all i need to do?

Cob · 20 Jun 2007 at 23:04

Hopefully yes.

Tho those 1gb 7950GT's will eat their fair share of whatever you get.

gazo7000 · 20 Jun 2007 at 23:07

na still says 1407 as ram

gazo7000 · 21 Jun 2007 at 00:06

the bios reads 3968 now

cheers. now how do a i get vista to read that? vista still reads 1407?

Bugblatter · 21 Jun 2007 at 03:19

I just added 2x1GB sticks the the 2x1GB sticks I already had.

I'm using Vista32 and had expected to have about 3.2GB showing in System, as I have an 8800GTX. Unfortunately it's only showing 2814MB.

I would expect gazo to only have 2GB available, as 2GB of the address space is taken up by the gfx RAM. Similarly I would expect 3.2GB to show up on mine. We're both way short.

Anyone any idea what's going on? I could really do with the extra 400MB.

By the way my BIOS shows the full 4GB. BFG 680i mobo, E6600 CPU.

shine · 21 Jun 2007 at 03:39

Have a look at this thread here on how to enable Physical Address Extensions map.

If you really need to use the whole 4GB then you need a 64 bit OS.

Bugblatter · 21 Jun 2007 at 12:44

Thanks for the reply. I've forced PAE to be enabled using "bcdedit /set pae forceenable", as Vista doesn't use boot.ini. Running bcedit shows me that it worked. However Vista isn't seeing any more RAM than it was before. It was worth a try though

After a little more research, including this , it seems that PAE only allows certain apps to use the extra memory. One of them is Sql Server, which I do have on the machine. My brief research suggests that I have to enable AWE for it, which I've done, butit's the Developer Edition and I don't know if AWE does anything for that.

*Mumbles geek mantra "Why does everything have to be so complicated?*

shine · 21 Jun 2007 at 15:23

As I said before if you need to use the full 4GB then you need a 64 bit OS. If it was easy then there would be a lot of unemployed IT geeks.

Bugblatter · 21 Jun 2007 at 18:52

I wasn't expecting the whole 4GB, but I'm 400MB shy of the 3.2GB I was expecting.

It seems 2814MB is a common amount to end up with; when I googled it I found loads of people quoting the same figure. No solutions unfortunately.