Why doesn't Windows show all 4gigabytes of memory I have installed?

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I read your explanation of seeing - or not seeing all 4 GB of RAM, but one thing I don't understand: You said that if I have, say, 3 GB, Microsoft "hides" the amount of RAM needed for the video card somewhere in the 3 GB, but if I have 4 GB, it cannot hide the amount used in video. I don't understand that at all. It sounds backwards, so it is obvious that I am not understanding what you meant. Can you re-phrase that somehow, so that I can understand it?

Thanks, Jim Anderson

James,

What he is saying is that if you had 3gigs and lets say you have a 512 meg video card you should see something along these lines for available memory 3584 mega bytes. Thats your 3 gigs the OS sees PLUS the memory from your video card. With 4 gigs, that is ALL that the OS will see, period. So you will lose functinality of 512 megs of your System Ram, because the OS will see the 512 megs of your video memory. Thats just the way the 32 bit systems is designed. When they made XP no one really had thoughts of more then 4 gigs of RAM then. I hope this helps clarify it for you.

natasha8384 - That is partly correct. SP1 will report the amount of system ram currently in the machine, but it will not use it since that is impossible os a 32bit unless you enable the various switches.

That means it is a cosmetical change more than anything. But I suppose it confuses people so likely it's for the better.

I have a brand new 32 bit system with 4 GB ram, and a pair of 1G graphics cards.

Windows only shows 1.7G of physical memeory, and in fact when I exceeded that amount (which is very easy with vista running) it slowed down terribly. What's going on here? This is a bit different from the rest of the thread.

Google works great...
32bit OS 4GB limit...
Video Memory is part of that limit.
4GB + 2 x 1GB Video = 6GB Total.
6GB Total - 4GB Addressable - 20% System use = 1.6 Available.

Using windows 2008 server 64bit I can see reporting the 4gig but using windows7 64 bit it reports 3.75 available

Funny, now that I have a 1gb video card, Vista (32 bit) is showing my 4gb of RAM. I wonder why that is...

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