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4 Gigs Installed But WinXP Says 3.25 Gigs Installed

I

iamhumble

Member
This is puzzling to me. I bought a new system and it came today. It is a spiffy Dell Precesion 380 workstation. I put in 4 1-Gig sticks of RAM ( much cheaper going to a third party then buying directly from dell). Well, I started the computer up again and only 3.25 GB of ram is being reported by Win XP Pro SP2. I checked the bios and it says 4 gigs is installed. How can this be?:Q


Edit: My motherboard can support 8 gigs.
 
I did come across this and tried it using the built in administrator account but the problem is still present. I don't think I have a bad memory stick or memory slot.

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This is due to Microsoft?s limiting the operating system ?out of the box? at 3.5GB of memory.

You will need to add a switch to their BOOT.INI file in order for the operating system to completely map the entire 4GB of memory.

You can e-mail the following steps to customers who are affected by this:
1) On the desktop, right-click the My Computer icon. If My Computer is not on the desktop, click the Start button, and then right-click My Computer.
2) Scroll down and click Properties.
3) In the System Properties window, click the Advanced tab.
4) Toward the bottom of the Advanced window, look for the Startup and Recovery section.
5) Click the Settings button.
6) The Startup and Recovery window opens to the System Startup section.
7) Click the Edit button to open the Boot.Ini file in Notepad.
8) Place the cursor after /fastdetect, and then press the spacebar.
9) Type /PAE. (PAE is short for Physical Address Extension.)
The Boot.ini file should resemble this:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /PAE
10) In the File menu, click Save.
11) Exit Notepad, Start Up and Recovery and System Properties.
12) Restart your machine. WindowsXP should now recognize 4GB of memory.
 
Thanks for a reply.

From what I read Win XP Pro ( 32 bit ) supports no more than 4 gigs of ram.

Win XP Pro ( 64 bit ) supports 8 gigs of ram.

I am still trying to debug the problem on side and will let you all know what it was for refence when I crack the case.
 
Yeah, it's a bug with windows XP, try what you typed in your previous post and see if it works, but what the heck do you need that much ram for anyway?!?!
 
mainly development work such as number crunching and munging data.

also, it doesn't help tp watch a dvd or two or play a game while things are compiling or running.🙂
 
Originally posted by: stevty2889
Yeah, it's a bug with windows XP, try what you typed in your previous post and see if it works, but what the heck do you need that much ram for anyway?!?!
Click to expand...

It's not a bug. This is due to the PCI hole (the pci bus needs some address space to map the hardware into). You can work around this with PAE but there are ramificaitons to that (like larger page table sizes) so it's not the default.

Bill
 
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