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    Sager NP8662 - Cannot detect 4GB RAM

    Discussion in 'Sager and Clevo' started by ski_power, Feb 23, 2011.

  1. ski_power

    ski_power Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi,

    I just noticed this thing today morning. When I went to System Properties on my Windows 7 Professional x64 it showed 4.00GB RAM (2.99GB usable). Terrified, (I'm an OCD kinda guy) I opened the performance monitor and there I saw that 1030MB RAM was "Hardware reserved".

    So, I quickly rebooted my computer and went to the BIOS but I couldn't find any setting that indicated anything about reserving memory. Can anyone help me?

    Thanks.
     
    ski_power, Feb 23, 2011
    #1
  2. Valtzer

    Valtzer Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have a feeling you are running 32-bit windows. It's a common problem when running x86 operating system as it was never designed to handle that much ram and only allows ~3GB of ram to be used.

    If you want a extremely detailed answer, the link is here.

    If you really are running a 64-bit OS, I have no idea.
     
    Valtzer, Feb 23, 2011
    #2
  3. ski_power

    ski_power Notebook Enthusiast

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    Yeah, I know that's the first thing to check. I'm certain beyond the shadow of doubt since I downloaded it from MSDN AA and they have both 32 and 64 bit editions separately.

    Also, I noticed this problem only after installing EnhanceMySe7en and Windows 7 SP1. It could have been there before, but I did not notice it. I uninstalled my nvidia display drivers and now only 6MB is reserved. Which is fine and matches up with my previous experience.

    I'm very very sure it's a 64 bit OS.
     
    ski_power, Feb 23, 2011
    #3
  4. ski_power

    ski_power Notebook Enthusiast

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    Ok so I fixed it.

    For the sake of archiving here's what I did.

    I uninstalled EnhancemySe7en. Then I uninstalled my nvidia display drivers. Allowed Windows to search for the drivers automatically but cancelled the install. Went to nvidia.com and downloaded a fresh set of drivers and installed them. Now only 6MB is reserved which makes sense since on my Core 2 Duo there is a 3MB L2 cache per core.

    Keywords - hardware Reserved memory x64 64 bit Windows 4 3 GB
     
    ski_power, Feb 23, 2011
    #4
  5. theriko

    theriko Ronin

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    Also I think there was a BIOS problem on this model re RAM reservation, what version BIOS are you running?
     
    theriko, Feb 23, 2011
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  6. mmarchid

    mmarchid Notebook Evangelist

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    Maybe EnhancemySe7en was reserving 1024MB of RAM for an optimized mapping to the GPU's 1024MB of VRAM.
    The reported 1030MB = 1024MB + 6MB (CPU total L2 cache)
     
    mmarchid, Feb 24, 2011
    #6