Vista 32 bit memory available issue

[montoyaclan]

I tried to do a search on this but failed to bring it up. WHat was the reason why 32bit Vista could only see 2 gb of memory again? I am running 3 GB at the moment and obviously the memory shows up as 2gb in Vista. Is the extra GB of memory even helping anything or should I just take it out? I was running the 64bit Vista but due to some programs not being supported (IE Itunes, Quicktime and various old favorite games) had to go back to 32 bit.


Thanks for any information.

 

[Nothinman]

Hardware configuration. Each piece of hardware and various motherboard components needs memory addresses in order to work so the BIOS assigns them from the top of the 4G range down. No one really noticed in the past because less resources were required and less memory was usually installed so the two never overlapped. But now they do and since the hardware's resources take priority the memory gets lost. Most BIOSes have an option to remap the lost memory addresses above the 4G mark to compensate for this but it requires an OS that'll be able to use those addresses and no 32-bit client release of Windows will do that.