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WIN7 showing 3GB usable memory out of 4GB installed

J

jag007

Member
Hi,
My newly installed WIN7 32 bit OS is showing 3GB usable memory out of 4 GB installed.
Also my Graphics card (Ati 4670 1GB) is showing 2 GB memory i.o.1GB which is actual memory of my GPU.
I do want to share my RAM, pls advise how to make windows use all 4GB RAM installed and not let it share memory. (As I have good 1GB memory for my GPU)
()🙂
Bregds.........
 
Run Windows 7 64 bit since Windows 7 32 bit can't address more than 3GB of memory. There's no reason not to run 64 bit nowadays, why the heck did you install 32 bit? Oh, and you won't be able to upgrade. You're looking at a fresh install.
 
Oh, I have too many programs installed on my 32 bit system.
Guess have to stick with 32 bit system atleast for now.
(If atall any solution to this issue let me know)
 
32 bit windows cannot adress more than 3GB of ram. Why did you install a 32bit OS onto a computer with 3GB+ of ram?
 
Nothinman said:
Yes, a fresh install of 64-bit Windows is required since MS intentionally gimped the 32-bit builds.
Click to expand...

Damn MS for conforming to convention and allowing Windows 32 bit to address 4 GiB of memory including memory mapped IO! They should go back to separate address spaces and make the life of driver programmers much harder.

Please, go troll elsewhere.
 
Ancalagon44 said:
Damn MS for conforming to convention and allowing Windows 32 bit to address 4 GiB of memory including memory mapped IO! They should go back to separate address spaces and make the life of driver programmers much harder.

Please, go troll elsewhere.
Click to expand...

It's not a troll, they gimped PAE intentionally in order to protect people from "bad" drivers. Virtually very 32-bit other OS out there can address up to 64G of physical memory with PAE just fine. Hel, even XP could pre-SP2.
 
Ancalagon44 said:
Damn MS for conforming to convention and allowing Windows 32 bit to address 4 GiB of memory including memory mapped IO! They should go back to separate address spaces and make the life of driver programmers much harder.

Please, go troll elsewhere.
Click to expand...

You have no idea what you are talking about, as Nothinman mentioned MS gimped PAE so that it basically does nothing and still has a 4GB cap while other OS's(OSX, Linux, BSD) can use PAE to address up to 64GB just fine with 32bit kernals.
 
Rifterut said:
32 bit windows cannot adress more than 3GB of ram. Why did you install a 32bit OS onto a computer with 3GB+ of ram?
Click to expand...

That's not true. 32-bit Windows will address up to 4GB of memory. The usable memory will be 4GB minus whatever memory hardware devices take up. I've seen as much as 3.5GB.
 
owensdj said:
That's not true. 32-bit Windows will address up to 4GB of memory. The usable memory will be 4GB minus whatever memory hardware devices take up. I've seen as much as 3.5GB.
Click to expand...

this is true, but GPU ram and any other PCIe/PCI card with any memory on it comes off the 4GB, and alot of people have 1GB video cards now.
 
Rifterut said:
this is true, but GPU ram and any other PCIe/PCI card with any memory on it comes off the 4GB, and alot of people have 1GB video cards now.
Click to expand...

Except that it's not a 1:1 mapping, the amount of required physical memory addresses varies per-device and for video cards is usually below 512M regardless of the amount of memory on the card.
 
Nothinman said:
Except that it's not a 1:1 mapping, the amount of required physical memory addresses varies per-device and for video cards is usually below 512M regardless of the amount of memory on the card.
Click to expand...

When i was running 32bit Vista(while i was waiting for the 64bit media in the mail) I ran it with a 4890 with 1GB and Windows showed 3.1GB. At the time i also had a raid card with 256MB Cache on it. So you are right was not a 1:1 map but was close in my experience.
 
Ancalagon44 said:
Damn MS for conforming to convention and allowing Windows 32 bit to address 4 GiB of memory including memory mapped IO! They should go back to separate address spaces and make the life of driver programmers much harder.

Please, go troll elsewhere.
Click to expand...

I know this is an older post and has been addressed, but seriously?? You have ~360 posts and have been here less than a year and you are deliberately confrontational towards a member with over 30K posts and 10 years of membership? Not to mention, Nothinman is consistently one of absolute best posters Anandtech has bar none!

Back to the thread though:
It has gone unmentioned, but Kernel space should be separate on top of that MMIO as well leaving the user with even less space before they start hitting the swap file.

Additionally, the OP should also realize that some programs may begin to run into the 2GB barrier for a single given process on a 32-bit OS which will calls a blue screen anytime the program attempts to instantiate more memory than that.

-Kevin
 
Additionally, the OP should also realize that some programs may begin to run into the 2GB barrier for a single given process on a 32-bit OS which will calls a blue screen anytime the program attempts to instantiate more memory than that.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

On what, Win95? Even my Winframe boxes running NT 3.51 would kill an app gracefully if it attempted to run past it's max memory page size.

Ring (0) or Kernel mode collisions causing BSOD's don't have anything to do with 2gig memory limits.

Otherwise, the 3/4 gig limit on 32-bit Microsoft OS's is highly annoying and a marketing move in my opinion. Imagine what would happen if Win2K or XP were able to use extended addressing up to 32 or 64gig? Well, you wouldn't need to upgrade to Vista or 2008, and chances are the older OS's would actually run faster with memory intensive apps like Photoshop.
 
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