wth wheres my ram?

ok so i've recently bought a dell 1545 with 4 gig of ram and vista home basic. when i turned on the computer and checked out the specs through dxdiag it said i only had 3.5 gigs of ram. i read somewhere that vista basic takes up 500mb of your ram so i thought maybe that was the problem. however, shortly after, i reformatted my the laptop to windows xp home edition sp2 and under dxdiag it still listed that i only had 3.5 gigs of ram. i have a ati 4330 gpu and that's a dedicated gpu so i don't think that the gpu is taking the ram.

so did dell play me here?

 

Dell did not steal your RAM. You are most likely using 32-bit editions of Windows, which cannot utilize a full 4GB of memory. If you install a 64-bit edition of Vista, you should be able to see that "missing" half GB. As it is, it's still physically there, just unusable.

 

ooo i forgot i thought that 32 bit OS could use a maximum of 4 gig... oh wellz. thanks :d i feel much better

 

Technically it can, since 32 bits = 2^32 bytes, which comes out to exactly 4GB. Of course, part of this is needed for system use and other things, so the part left over for free use by the OS is around 3.5GB.

 

a 32bit system can address 2^32bytes of ram

this address includes memory from your dedicated GPU... which means if you have a 32bit system with a 1GB GPU card, you'll have around 3GB RAM usable...

go for 64bit

 

Read this:

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx

If you don't want to read it all, look for the section "32-bit Client Effective Memory Limits".

Mike