memory not recognized by Vista, but is in BIOS

[Sweet_Erika]

Hello, I am having a RAM issue with Vista and I thought you guys could help. Here is my problem....I have 4 gigs of RAM in my PC. The BIOS recognizes it just fine, but Vista says that I only have 2 gigs. Is this anything I should be concerned about and how do I fix this?

Thanks for your time and your help is much appreciated.

[jbennet]

i know for a fact that XP had issues with systems having over 4gb ram so maybe vista still has this problem

[Monte]

Vista is far more picky over the hardware than XP, is your RAM generic or actual makes ? What's the full spec breakdown of your PC included the specs on your RAM.

There are certain cases where things like RAM behave perfectly in XP but they are not as stable for Vista so Vista does not use them, etc.

[Sweet_Erika]

Here are the specs:

4x 1 gig Super Talent DDR2 667mhz PC5300 RAM
Intel dual core 2.4 mhz
Foxconn motherboard 975X7AB

Are these components low quality? I haven't heard of these brands before.

[Sweet_Erika]

oops, excuse me...I meant a 2.4 ghz processor.

[lasher511]

i know for a fact that XP had issues with systems having over 4gb ram so maybe vista still has this problem

That was because XP was made to only support up to 4GB of ram.

As for your Ram issue i would first check that all four Dimm's are in place and that your motherboard can support that much ram.(although i cannot see any reason why it would not support that)

The other thing you can try is running windows update and see if that fixes the problem. I am not sure how many updates if any microsoft have released for vista since its release if any but as is with all new software there are often alot of little bugs that pop up after the realease that never even showed up in Beta.

[jbennet]

i believe only windows server supports the 4-8gb ram range properley

[Sweet_Erika]

Thank you everyone for your help. I did a search on Microsoft's website and found that this has been confirmed a problem by Microsoft. There doesn't seem to be a fix, so oh well. Maybe in the future something will be released to resolve this matter.

[Skipper_Griffin]

Do you have 32 or 64bit OS ? the 32 bit version can only recognise 4GB memory max, and has to allocate memory to the I/O devices including graphics cards etc. If you have a 512MB graphics card you system will only show 3.4GB..

[jbennet]

1) even if its 64 bit , most apps wont take proper advantage of more than 4gb memory or will require a better licence to use more than a certain amount (i think mssql does this)

2) in relation to the graphics card bit, it wont do this unless it is onboard or hypermemory

[sennetor]

all I'm going to say is 2^32=4GB of address space of which 1 or 2 GB is used for addressing system components.
If you need to access more than 2 Gb of ram you'll need an operating system that knows how to address that extra space i.e. Windows Vista 64.
2^64=Loads of GB

Windows Vista 32 =2-3GB of Ram
Windows Vista 64 =128GB of Ram.