Hello,

I know this is over reported and pretty much common knowledge amongst most circles (most of whom frequently orbit Daniweb) but I've decided to revisit an age old issue.
The problem of some versions of Vista not reading or display 4GB or RAM isn't a new exactly a new one, so why is it still causing so many issues?

You'll be hard pressed to find an IT forum that hasn't got an article of some kind on this. If it has been going on this long why might you ask - has a practical solution been found or why weren't retailers better prepared?

A daft basis for a blog entry most of you will no doubt say but bare with me on this one; I recently came across some items on a few of our e-commerce sites while at work. They all have 4GB RAM, they're all 32 Bit and none of the ones displayed will actually be able to use all 4GB they're loaded with.

With this being such a well known and documented problem why are buyers still purchasing vast quantities of products that won't meet their specifications? Maybe to try and keep good relations with suppliers and maintain those bulk discounts or perhaps because they simply don't know.

This issue wasn't conceived overnight; it has been 'in the oven' for a fair while. And is partially down to a mathematical issue of 32 Bit systems. This is nothing new, but still a major issue.

One reason that seems to make this seem even worse is that over the years we've become used to being able to simply upgrade when we were no longer happy with the performance of an item. If your camera card gets full quick - you can simply get a bigger one (16GB if it's SDHC), if you're running low on storage space - there's copious amounts of external hard disks - and the upper quartile of what we could obtain has always been so far ahead that the void in between was one that you felt you could actually fit the entire ether capacious into with ease.

And suddenly we're told that this may no longer be the case for one item in particular - RAM being the said item. We've gone from having maybe 128MB or even a whopping 256MB of RAM - and the possibility’s were endless; it was utter madness even contemplating that you would ever need more, let alone a whole Gigabyte.

That wasn't that long ago (even in my youthful age I still recall such a time) and yet it appears almost overnight our love of constant upgrading is being forced into change.
Either way I'll certainly raise this with the powers that be on Monday.

Dazza