Windows xp sees only 3gb

Last edited: Mar 27, I'm not familier with Intel cpu's or their chipsets but XP should use up to 3. You need to turn on the virtual address bit. I can't remmeber off the top of my head how to do it.

I had to turn it off in one case, it was pretty dumb. I cannot find the virtual address bit that you are talking about. This is driving me nuts.

Joined Mar 6, Location New York. Thanks for the link redrumy. I set my boot. INI" tab "Advanced Options" button. In addition Total Physical Memory 2, I'm running 3GB with no boot.

You might try changing your pagefile size down to MB, or disable it. Or update your bios maybe? Nebuchadnazzar said:. Click to expand I set the memory at with timings of 5.

I have the Asus i MB with the latest bios. I tried setting my page file to MB and also tried disabling pagefile. A pic of my system info if that helps. It's like windows throws a gig of my ram in black whole memory garbage bin or something.

If I use much more memory than this windows will throw an error and say its out of memory. Did you try a fresh install? You might need to let windows use a new ACPI driver. Try updating that first if it doesn't work maybe a fresh install. Something doesn't sound right, and to me it sounds more like hardware errors.

Have you tried running memtest to see if it sees all the ram and see if it passes testing? That would be my next move. I think this post is kinda old, but I am running Windows 7 Beta 64bit and I am only seeing 3gb of ram used. I have 4gb. System was using 2gb and vm was set for 1gb???????????? I am updating my bios right now, but I will repost if thatfixes it.

I think that would do it. I can see how all these factors, chipset, bios, OS, 32 vs 64 would have an impact on the amount of memory a system can address, but I do not think it is one single thing that does it. It all comes down to what is on your bus lines, how much space each of these items take up in RAM, whether or not they are disabled and removed from the memory map.

There is also a trick that can be used on some newer machines that if you have say 6 GB installed with Vista x86 installed, you can get into BIOS and set the video memory for on-board video graphics chip-sets, like the ATI HD to appear above the 4 GB RAM boundary but yet, the Vista x86 driver still can see the memory and use it, there are a couple of other items where you can do this too.

Technically, the reason why Vista x86 cannot see the full 4 GB of RAM you see, is that it's looking at the hardware and the core of it's own OS and subtracting out that from the "user mode" RAM, in other words what you can use or rather what external applications can use in which you in return use them. Simple, it's a Microsoft licensing issue, that's all. The reason why Vista is so hard to understand about the complex coding used in the kernel, is that you would need to sit down with the team at Microsoft to get the full details.

In short, they didn't have a clear picture of what people wanted out of their operating system because they went with surveys that were way too vanilla and didn't have slots for explaining how it was to work. Their surveys were pointed for their employees rather than the consumers which was the wrong thing to do. Technically, the way in which Vista x86 shows the memory is in fact correct, it's showing you how much memory you can actually use, it says, "Memory Free", although, I would have said out of x GB RAM, then list what is sitting in the RAM that you cannot access, just to make people more happy.

Most applications in the Windows 2k, XP, and Vista don't use more than 2 GB for anyone application unless you are doing video editing, etc. For this very reason, the speed of your processor, the speed of your RAM and it's timings become very important if you are gaming because you cannot access much RAM and to minimize that lag seen in many of today's games they have to get creative, that includes doing streaming textures. With the advent of better GP-GPU performance and being programmable these days, that will take the major hurdles for your machine and allow you a comfortable range of detail while not bogging your system down, even if you can see only up to 2 GB RAM but have 4 GB installed.

As far as the software not being compatible with Windows Vista or 7 x64, that may not be the issue. You might be trying to use a really old application that uses bit calls which is been dropped in Windows 7 and Vista, both on the 32 and 64 bit versions. If you need that type of compatibility, there are applications that emulate that hardware setup and allow you to use those apps on the newer OSes. By default, most applications are not aware of what operating system they are running on nor what edition type 32 or bit very few check the Microsoft strings for what it's sitting on.

It's one of those, right click on the icon on the desktop or in the Program Files off of the Start menu button, you go to Properties. It's in there that you can change the compatibility. If you need a specific set of instructions I can put that out there for you or Michael can do so as well. Your email address will not be published.

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Michael Pietroforte. Michael Pietroforte is the founder and editor in chief of 4sysops. Latest posts by Michael Pietroforte see all. Email Address. Mailing List. Related Articles. Office bit vs. Office - bit vs. Windows 7 x64 vs. Windows 7 bit vs. Somehow I would think that even if you were running XP64 you would still be limited to 4G unless MS decided to up the limit for no reason. That makes no sense at all, but I'm not terribly surprised.

This looks pretty definitive. Fast forward button is installed on your credit card. By default, most motherboards use the physical address space just below 4GiB to map the virtual, but not in the OS sense addresses used by expansion cards and other peripherals. Note that there is no solution for accessing all 4GiB of installed memory on standard motherboards that don't have said option.

In the limited amount of hardware docs I've seen, PCI-E tends to eat way more memory than all the other buses combined; older boards let you get 3. Limit on XP64 appears to be GB.