CF-30 Real Ram Reports/Limit?

While on a trip last week I picked up 2-2 gig sticks and stuck them in the CF-30.

The machine reports seeing the 4gig but only reports 3.2gig as available?

I have not seen this before and it shows this in both the BIOS screenand Device Manager.

Another call to Panasonic support lead to them claiming the machine reports Available menory after drivers have been loaded as well as installed memory.

This sounds like "Hooey" to me?
I have not seen any other machines do this.
I also had Vista on it when I installed the Ram and now have XP on it yet they report the exact same spec.

I have also tried unloading some drivers and stopping services but there is no real change in memory reported.

What I really wonder is whether I got bad or incompatable memory somehow and should try to return it or does the Toughbook really just report it differently than most machines?

Thanks
Ed

 

Ed

No need to call Panasonic support

We have the answers here

You need a 64 bit operating system to see the full 4GB

We talk about this here

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=341116


Alex

 

Thanks for the speedy reply.
I am amazed(sort of) that Panasonic gave me the wrong answer even after talking to an engineer and calling me back,which also amazed me.

Thanks for the info and link.

I also bought an XP recovery disc set from a guy on eBay and it was for the correct version of CF-30 for me but it would the computer would not boot after restoring the image from this disc?

I had to use another XP disc to enter another Key into and repair the imaged installation ad then it would boot.
All of the image files seemed to bethere as I had the utilities,etc from the image but the freshly imaged disc would not run without external repair.....odd?

Ed

 

You can not use the 4Gb RAM, if you have Microsoft Windows XP (or older system). Just install Windows Vista (not 64 bit, but 32 bit also) and you will use all 4Gb on your machine...
I had a lot of experiments. And as result I had only once to see in XP the 3.6Gb RAM (it is record for XP). But I experimented with a lot of configurations of motherboards, RAM modules and Video Cards for this.
Usially XP supports not more than 3.2 Gb RAM - it is rule!!!

 

Vista had exactly the same limitations as I said,it was on the machine when I upgraded the RAM.
Unless there is something needed to enable the extra memory?
Doubtful to me.

Ed

 

Post the full model of your cf-30
I will look up the part number of the correct disk
If the restore dvd is for the wrong model, it usualy won't install
The dvd might be damaged


Alex

 

See, please, the screen shot of the system information of my laptop Asus N51Vg - Windows Vista 32 bit, 4 Gb RAM:

 

avservice, how manyn MBs do you use for the Video? Maybe you use about 800 Mb from the RAM for the video memory?

 

Report the amount in task manager


Alex

 

Yes, but that is because you are using Vista SP1. XP and original Vista (before SP1) report how much memory is accessible to the OS and user, whereas Vista SP1 reports how much memory is physically built into the system. However, the old 32bit-limit still applies, and Vista SP1 cannot actually access the full 4GB it reports - see this Microsoft support article regarding this issue.

Note: all of the above applies to the 32bit versions only, of course.

There are tools which can correctly report the amount of built-in memory in XP, like CPU-Z.

There are also somewhat messy ways to get around the limit, to a degree: some programs like Superspeed RamDisk can place a ram disk in the normally inaccessible memory region, and then you can place the page file into the ram disk. There are several threads on this, like this one. I have a ram disk set up that way for my 32bit XP; it works quite fine, although I had to play around with the options for quite a while until it worked with suspend and hibernation.

 

I know this soft. So, it is same laptop Asus N51Vg with Windows Vista SP1 32 bit and 4 Gb RAM:


Is it real RAM or not?

 

Can you look in task manager


Alex

 

You are right
See here:


But, I think my Video Card use 1Gb from the RAM???

 

Specs are


Graphics hardware
Nvidia Geforce G105M
Amt of video RAM512MB

Alex

 

No, I have Nvidia GeForce GT130M 1Gb:

 

Well… darn it all, I’m wrong

I thought Google was my friend

I looked it up and that was the first hit for the specs


Alex