Question:

Hi,

I just got finished building myself a new system…to bad for me that I didn’t think to look and see if Vista had a memory maximux. I purchased the full retail version of Vista Ultimate. My new system has 4GB of physical ram…Vista varys betwee bootups between 3.34 or 3.25 GB of ram. I, like many others see all the ram in bios but not in the OS. I have an Intel 975xbx2 MB, Core2 DUO@2.93Ghz /w 4MB L2, PCI-E Radeon x1950 Pro 256 MB and 2 other addin cards.

Here is my question…does it have any effect on the OS or at the hardware layer to run in this configuration?

Observation/Frustration…Why,in 2007…with the tecnology level that is available today…are we still forced to deal withe the same basic issues that we had since the 8088 processor. I’ve read alot of the other post and also HPs’ responce and it almost sounds as though its…physical ram(4 GB) minus address space of all addin cards equals Vista ram…am I wrong?

Charles

Answer:

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Ever since I created this post about the real memory maximum in Windows (including Windows XP and Windows Vista, and any 32-bit version of Windows), I get A LOT of questions about it. I thought I’d take a minute to answer some of them:

Hello

I just wanted to find out why my asus board p5w-dh-d picks up 4gigs of memory in the bios but only 2gig in windows vista business 32bit

Thank you.

Answer: Read this post. That’s just the way it works. Sorry.

and (more after the jump)

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Update: use 64-bit if you have at least 2GB of RAM. If you have the choice between Windows Vista and Windows 7, use Windows 7.

The original article (written in 2007) is included for your reference below. It discusses the problems with 64-bit versions of Windows, some of which still exist, but to a much lesser degree. I’m using 64-bit Windows 7 on just about all my computers now, and it’s working great. I have quite a variety of hardware, too, and haven’t run into any compatibility problems.

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