Not recognising all memory on Dell XPS 720

[mikepatton32]

Hi

Ive bought some new memory for my Dell XPS 720. Ive replaced the 2- 1 gig ddr2 667 for 2- 2 gig ddr2 800, 4 gig in total. Ive put them into the right slots on the board and in the bios it says theres 2 gig in each slot. But on windows and benchmark programs its only showing as a total of 2.75 gig of memory? My board supports 4 gig on a 32bit operating system or 8 gig on a 64bit. Im using Vista 32 home premium. Someone please help.

Thanks Karl

p.s the new memory is Corsair

[Psymon]

This will be down to what your OS is. 32 bit or 64 bit.
You might find your answer is thread.

[liljim]

How much video power do you have in that rig? The 32/64 bit limitations include video memory as well. If your using Vista 32 than your video is taking up the rest i'd say. Most people with 4 gigs on 32 bit only see 3.5 or so, thats all i see of my 4 gigs but 2.75 is pretty low unless your using sli/Xfire.

[mikepatton32]

Ive got 2 Nvidia 8600 GTS that are sli configured, thats 512 for the both. Its got a quad core processor.

[liljim]

your ok then, thats why its not seeing all the memory. Between the video cards, swap file, system memory and so on you've maxed out the 32 bit OS. Theres nothing wrong with any of your hardware and it will all run fine as is.

[mikepatton32]

Thanks for that, would it be worth installing vista 64 bit? no wonder microshaft are binning vista

On my pc it says Total Physical Memory ram 4 gig
Total Phystical memory 2.75
Available physical memory 1.69
Total virtual 5.70
Available virtual 4.57

[Psymon]

Hold out a few more months and Windows 7 will be squeezed out of Mi€ro$ha£t's rear end.

If you're going to have to pay to move to a 64 bit OS then you may as well get the fixed version of Vista. That what people seems to be calling windows 7 anyway.

But yes, if you move to an appropriate 64 bit OS you'll extend your memory limit far beyond 4GB.

ie:
Windows Vista Home Basic 64-bit supports up to 8 GB of RAM.
Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit supports up to 16 GB of RAM.
Windows Vista Business and Ultimate 64-bit support 128 GB of RAM.

I've yet to find any news about how much RAM each version of windows 7 will support, but I've heard they're going to be stupid enough to release many different versions with features locked, again.
edit: trying to find the limits I found useful page. Hopefully it'll have the windows 7 limits on it closer to release.

[liljim]

is this just a gaming/home machine? if so then dont waste your money, theres not enough 64 bit apps nor is there enough driver support to justify the change. Also, unless your running a demanding server you wont need nor see the difference either. Vista 32 sucks enough with hardware/software compatibility and the "new" version in the works will be nothing more than new eye candy and different bugs. Its going to be a while before you see another good, simple, supported OS thats worth its weight in salt.