[sleepyhills]

Hi there everyone, I'm new here.
Important Specs: T9300 @ 2.50 GHz
4.00 GB of RAM.

Anywho, I've been abit confused with my computer as of late. It began with a clean install of XP to get rid of Vista, and after several days of slaving away with it, I finally got it in. However, when I went to see my system information, it said that there is only 3GB of RAM. I didn't understand it myself, so I tried reinstalling Windows, but to no avail, it showed the same information again. What doesn't make sense to me is that at the startup (at bootup), it detects 4GB (4096MB) of RAM installed.

So my question here is that is this a problem? Is the missing RAM still there in use, but just isn't seen by Windows anymore? Help would be appreciated.

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Assuming you are using a 32-bit version of XP, you are limited by the fact that any 32-bit operating system can only address 2^32 bytes of memory. That works out to exactly 4096MB, or 4GB. However, the operating system has to use some of that address space to address memory-mapped devices, such as video cards, and buses on your motherboard. (You can read a much more detailed explanation on this here.) Every system is different, but typically a 32-bit operating system will only recognize 2.5GB-3.5GB out of 4GB. It looks like you fall in the middle of that range.

The only solution is to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system. However, 3GB is plenty for the average user anyways.

[stettybet0]

Assuming you are using a 32-bit version of XP, you are limited by the fact that any 32-bit operating system can only address 2^32 bytes of memory. That works out to exactly 4096MB, or 4GB. However, the operating system has to use some of that address space to address memory-mapped devices, such as video cards, and buses on your motherboard. (You can read a much more detailed explanation on this here.) Every system is different, but typically a 32-bit operating system will only recognize 2.5GB-3.5GB out of 4GB. It looks like you fall in the middle of that range.

The only solution is to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system. However, 3GB is plenty for the average user anyways.