XP Home reports wrong ram amount

[rumpeltumskin]

I have an Abit AN52V motherboard, with an AMD 84 X2 5200 processor running XP home with service pack 3 installed. I had two 1 gig sticks of Muskin DDR2 installed and just filled the last two slots with identical 1 gig sticks, jumping my up to 4 gigs total. In the system control panel, Windows says it is only 3.5 total. Sosoft Sandra says the same thing but CPU-Z sees all 4 gigs. What's the deal? Is Windows reserving some of that ram for some sinister purpose?

I have also rest the CMOS and played musical chairs with the ram sticks, they all seem fine and my slots for the ram all seem fine too. Any ideas?

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

You're using a 32bit operating system. It will not read beyond 4gigs of RAM, however, due to how memory addressing works, your videocard and other things that require memory addresses are taking up those addresses already and by the time windows gets to address the rest of the memory (your system RAM) it halts where it can read max (4gigs). Hence you see 3.5 gigs installed. Is your videocard a 512gig card by chance?

It's time to move on to a 64bit OS my friend. You just met the limitation of 32bit.

Very best,

 

[rumpeltumskin]

I have a copy of Windows XP Pro 64 but the first time I installed it, it freaked out when trying to play games like Civilization 4. This was almost 2 years ago I guess. maybe I should give it another try and reinstall it. I don't own a copy of Vista yet and the thought of buying it makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth. Thx for the response Mal

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

x64bit driver support is much, much, much better now. You should be able to play Civ4 on a x64 bit platform with the latest service packs and proper 64bit drivers for your hardware.

Or you can just use your 3.5gigs of RAM with XP 32bit. XP won't even really make much use of that much ram anyways, nor will most software you use (due to how virtual memory works).

Very best,

 

[Denithor]

What he said.

Yeah, for most uses there will be very little difference between 3.5GB and 4GB. If you're a heavy Photoshop user or for certain video editing apps or heavy texture 3D cad systems & games you might see a bit more use from 4GB but otherwise just stick with XP32 for the better compatibility overall.

 

[rumpeltumskin]

LOL, the most demanding thing I have been doing lately is just playing Lord of the Rings online

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

Yea, that is not worth the headache of an OS swap. You won't notice the difference. And unless you're using a recent Photoshop, you still won't make much use of your 4gigs of RAM in 32bit OS, as it will again mostly work from your swap/page file rather than try to keep all of it in your much faster RAM (Vista has better memory handling, and in 64bit, having like 8 gigs you can really make use of it in things like Photoshop where you can literally keep it to the RAM and never on your drive--since you can stop the page file after you get up there in RAM).

But for LotR? Hehe, nah, you're fine dude. 3.5gigs is better than 2gigs. Leave it at that unless you literally want to see more/use more.

Very best,

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: rumpeltumskin
Sosoft Sandra says the same thing but CPU-Z sees all 4 gigs. What's the deal? Is Windows reserving some of that ram for some sinister purpose?

Utilities like these just return what's in the SPD via SMBUS/WMI/ACPI. If the SPD could be programmed to return a value of "DUDE!", Sandra and CPU-Z would report that you have "DUDE!" amount of RAM. In that way, they're sort of useless.

 

[Nothinman]

you still won't make much use of your 4gigs of RAM in 32bit OS, as it will again mostly work from your swap/page file rather than try to keep all of it in your much faster RAM (Vista has better memory handling, and in 64bit, having like 8 gigs you can really make use of it in things like Photoshop where you can literally keep it to the RAM and never on your drive--since you can stop the page file after you get up there in RAM).

That's not true at all. XP won't start using the pagefile until memory pressure gets high and it will use all of available memory for things like the filesystem cache even if the running apps aren't capable of using it all. Vista is more proactive about caching things but that's about it.