PC sees 3 Gig but says it's better with 4

[smeezekitty]

A word of warning about PAEPATCH: It doesn't work with all drivers and some will cause a BSoD

[Ponch]

While he is half-joking, jaclaz is right, it can be done and does solve the problem (<link>), but it's frowned upon by MS.

It solves "a" problem but not "the" (my) problem.

 

I am of course happy that the case is closed.

 

As a side note, it is really sad how I spent all these years in believing that the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was actually a hardware abstraction layer and that it was hardware related.

Happy or sad, it seems that (your) sarcasm cannot bend (my) harsh reality.

 

Ponch, no offense meant and I could be wrong, but I think that jaclaz is correct.  Regardless of what the BIOS says, I think that the Windows kernel is "artificially" limiting Windows to 3GB and by patching it you would be able to use the full 4GB.

Yes indeed (you could be wrong).

 

Ponch, with all due respect, both NT-family and unix-family OSes do fully supersede BIOS during the boot process. Hence, unless the machine's chipset does not contain a memory hoist, no matter what the BIOS thinks, those OSes can access all (or almost all) installed memory.

Have you actually ever witnessed that? I haven't.

 

Anyway... as much as you, I hate it when people blatantly ignore advices. So for all you folks, even in the knowledge that none of you would pay me a beer after I would lose this half hour of my life,...I did it.

On this Motherboard which Bios only sees 3Gigs (before any OS kicks in) while 2x2Gigs are physically present, driven by this this PAE and NoExecute enabled AMD K8 processor I swapped HDD and loaded Win7 64 bits and oh, surprise, while Win7 sees 4 Gigs it still only gets 3 (2.87) Gig usable. This didn't come as a surprise as it is in fact written up this very web page I'm facing, as a thread's title. At he risk of repeating myself, this is not a 32bit OS problem. As we say in french, CQFD.

I have an other example were a 512Meg stick is seen (limited) as 256Meg (even if used alone). Slightly different problem, same outcome. Bios has the 1st and the last word. This is what I see.

[jaclaz]

Happy or sad, it seems that (your) sarcasm cannot bend (my) harsh reality.

 

Which saddens me (your harsh situation much more than the apparent failure of my perverted humour to at least cheer you up a bit ).

I guess that getting a couple of identical 1.5 Gb sticks is out of question , right?

 

jaclaz

[submix8c]

Slightly O/T, but I have several older MoBo's (HP's) that boot with 256MB RAM (SDRAM limited supply) sticks but one stick is only recognized as 128MB. They are not the same brand, BTW. Seems that the RAM chips aren't correctly recognized (the MBIT problem and how many chips on the stick).

 

IOW, are you *certain* that they're a matched set? May be the problem.

 

edit - above is a "generic" description, so please don't slam me for using less-than-desirable terms and phrase.

Edited January 23, 2015 by submix8c

[Ponch]

IOW, are you *certain* that they're a matched set? May be the problem.

As certain as I am that you did not read the thread either.

FYI,

-the original question is answered; HWinfo was mistakenly reporting 2+1 Gig as running Dual Channel, that was obvious to Tripredacus in the 1st answer (case closed).

-the collateral assumption (hammering) by all the Witnesses of J. that patching the OS would bypass the bios limitation is at last dismissed by hard facts and, I hope, accepted after I had to post 5 more times (case closed).

I can't believe I'll need a mod to close this.