Vista Banter - View Single Post - 4 Gig or ram- Only showing 3 gig

JW

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

" wrote in
message ...
Hi. The person who mentioned the 64bit edition I run vista ultimate and
after
some research, I found that at best, the 32bit with 4g ram will show 3.5g?
This puzzled me, so after much digging I found that the 64 home basic will
see 4g, home premium is 16g and 64bit ultra, at 32g. I heard the same
thing
from other sources. BUT WHY????

" wrote:

Hello,
Just read the longest post on this issue with no result so let try
again.
If i have 4 gig, only 3 shows, 750mb is reservered for the system.
Doesn't that seem a little stupid? If i have 3 gig of ram, 3 gig
shows in vista, here it has not needed to reserve 750mb. So why does
the first scenario need 750 for the system, and the second does not?
This would mean that the second does not have any ram for its system,
same devices and os. I would have thought that both situations would
result in having 750 stripped for the system. My old box, XP 256 mb
ram all that was avaliable and did not need dedicated system ram.
Does anyone have a straight answer for this? Yes i could run 64 bit
os, but at the moment i want to get 4 gig running in my 32 bit
environment.

I tried the following switches with no change.
1. Reboot Vista to safe mode with command line
2. Run the command : bcdedit /set PAE ForceEnable
3. Run bcdedit again to verify the switch is added
4. Reboot the system and check whether the problem is fixed

This is from the original post:

http://groups.google.com.au/group/mi...dbc2867738d289

"LOL, I was scratching my head over that one too. By definition, a 32-
bit CPU
can directly address up to 4GB of memory. But apparently nearly 1GB of
that
is reserved for devices. So the most you can possibly see is 3.12GB in
a
32-bit system. The way I read it, there is no way around it, no "fix"
if
you're using a 32-bit version of Vista.

To see any more than 3.12 GB you have to be using a 64-bit version of
Vista
plus meet all those other requirements (64-bit CPU instruction set,
chipset
with 8GB address space, BIOS that supports memory remapping). That's
the way
I read it anyway.

I think the DEP/ PAE thing is a whole different (but related) issue. "