What is an Acer to do?

I have an Acer Aspire 5100. I just had 4 GB of RAM installed. I just went to the profile of my computer to check something out and what it says is this: 2302 of installed memory. Then right below it has slot 1 -2048/ slot 2 -2048, so I know that these guys installed 2 chips of memory. What's funny is that if I have 4GB of RAM how come it says I'm only using 2302 of installed memory. Did I get scammed by buying 2 extra gigs of memory that aren't being used? Is this Acer Laptop even capable of handling that much memory? Is there anything else that can be done to upgrade this laptop? My processor is an AMD Turion 64x2 TL-50 (1.6 GHz, 2x256KB L2 cache) Can this be upgraded to make it run faster? or is it just a waste of time and money? Anything you can help me with would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

Vista 32 only recognizes ~3gb and your video card may be taking a chunk as well.

 

The aspire 5100 series can handle up to 4Gb of memory (2x2Gb), however as tabbedout pointed out to you if you are using a 32bit windows then you cannot use the full 4Gb of memory.

If you want to upgrade the processor you can upgrade to any of the turion x2 of the TL series (Trinidad 90nm or Tyler 65nm), essentially TL-56 up to a TL-68.

Your video is integrated (ATI Xpress 1100) so you won't be able to do anything with that.

Hope this info helps you.

 

Thanks guys for the info, but let me see if I can sort this out. I am running a 32 bit windows, so can this laptop be upgraded to 64 and if so how to do it. I suppose it would mean a new processor, but in doing this would it help with speed and performance. I read in certain forums people complaining about things not being compatible with 64. Actually, what would I get out of the upgrade?

 

The aspire 5100 is fully compatible with 64bit windows vista as is, you don't need to upgrade any hardware to install 64bit vista. The amd turion x2 TL-50 that you have in there is perfectly capable of running 64bit vista (all turions are 64bit processors) and that 4Gb or ram will come in handy with a 64bit OS as you can actually use all 4Gb then.

As for compatibility well this will depend on what software you use, I ran vista x64 on my 5102wlmi for about 8months and didn't have any issues. But like I said the software I was using worked perfectly fine on vista x64. Remember 64bit is backwards compatible with most* 32bit programs so you shouldn't have any problems running them. There are however a few 32bit programs out there that will refuse to work on 64bit but they are few and far between.

 

Thanks Evo! That's what I wanted to know.

 

Yes, there's no problem using 32bit softwares on Vista 64bits. I could install everything softwares I need without problem, except Sony Picture Motion Browser wich is absolutely not compatible.

 

No Problem