Am i getting full use of my ram?

griffdaddy

Hi everyone, I posted recently about upgrading the ram in my Vostro 1000, and finally took the plunge yesterday and ordered 4gb from memoryc.com which scarily arrived straight away this morning. Anyway, i opened the laptop and stuck in the two 2gb modules and booted up the laptop (it's running Vista home premium 32), but the system information only says that there's 2686 of ram. Now i know some of it would be missing for the OS, when it had 2gigs before it only showed as just under 900, but is it right that there should be such a deficit with 4gigs? Don't get me wrong, the thing still runs like a rocket compared to how it was before, but i'm wondering if i'm doing something wrong or could be getting more out of it. Thanks in advance for your help!

cpu-dude

32-bit OS's can only utilise approx. 3.2GB of RAM, Vista sometimes says thing's like 1GB (768MB usable) depending on the RAM itself and updates. What does is say in My Computer properties?

griffdaddy

Thats where it says 2686. it must be picking up both modules if it gives that number no? i wonder if i had a 64 bit os would it be worth the hassle? Thanks for your help so far

cpu-dude

griffdaddy wrote: »

Thats where it says 2686. it must be picking up both modules if it gives that number no? i wonder if i had a 64 bit os would it be worth the hassle? Thanks for your help so far

Well you should get the full use of the 4GB but it depends on what you'll be doing on your computer. I haven't seen a 2GB stick of RAM only show up as 1344 before... is it definately the correct type for your laptop?

griffdaddy

yeah i'm pretty sure it's the correct type. The laptop wouldn't work if it wasn't, or would it? The maximum supported ram on a vostro 1000 is apparently 2gb (according to Dell) but everyone else puts 4gb in with no problem, so i don't think thats the issue. Would the graphics card sharing this memory be the cause? I'll run ubuntu off a cd and see what that says

cpu-dude

griffdaddy wrote: »

yeah i'm pretty sure it's the correct type. The laptop wouldn't work if it wasn't, or would it? The maximum supported ram on a vostro 1000 is apparently 2gb (according to Dell) but everyone else puts 4gb in with no problem, so i don't think thats the issue. Would the graphics card sharing this memory be the cause? I'll run ubuntu off a cd and see what that says

How much RAM does it say there is in the BIOS?

Effluo

A mate of mine had the same problem with a toshiba lower end laptop.

With his case he had like 1g of ram in the laptop but only 9xxmbs showed!!!

It was the motherboard for him as the max amount of ram allowable was 9xx?
don't ask me why but it was.

So it's most probably just the max amount of ram your mobo supports....

soz

SickBoy

Download and run CPU-Z and in the SPD tab check the memory is being identified correctly.
I'm guessing it's something to do with the 32bit OS limitation and shared graphics memory.

griffdaddy

The bios shows 4gb. I reckon sickboy is right. is there anyway i can reconfigure it so i can use more of it despite the os limitations? or does the os limitation include RAM that is being used with the video card?

SickBoy

There might be an option in the BIOS to change the amount of RAM that the graphics can access. It could also be an option in the display properties.

the_syco

cpu-dude wrote: »

Well you should get the full use of the 4GB but it depends on what you'll be doing on your computer. I haven't seen a 2GB stick of RAM only show up as 1344 before... is it definately the correct type for your laptop?

It's correct. The rest is most likely being taken by Intels sh|tty onboard graphics card.

Older Interl cards had an option to lessen the amount of RAM it takes.

griffdaddy

it's an AMD Turion 64 mobile TK-53, and i think the graphics card is an ATI Radeon Xpress or something to that effect. When i check it out in display settings it says

Total Available Graphics Memory: 1215 MB
Dedicated Video Memory: 128MB
System Video Memory: 0 MB
Shared System Memory: 1087 MB

I'm getting a bit outside of what i understand now, but is that not an unnecessarily big amount of the ram to be taking? (I'm presuming Shared system memory is that) I mean it only had a gig of ram in the whole laptop before i upgraded this morning, so it wasn't getting that previously

griffdaddy

ok, i had a look around the bios and couldn't find anywhere to control how ram the video card takes. does anyone know where else i might find that option? is is possible to get a graphics card that uses the express pci slot in a laptop, then disable the on-board one?

Solitaire

In the BIOS look under "Chipset" or "Integrated Peripherals" menus (they might be buried in one of the top-level menus themselves) and keep an eye out for anything related to "UGP" or "IGP Framebuffer Allocation" which'd probably have "1024" or "Auto" selected - drop it down to 256 or so.

Also check out the little Windows graphics utility, usually accessible in the toolbar or by right-clicking the desktop. See if there's an option to change the framebuffer in there, usually hidden in an Advanced menu or some such.

sdanseo

Windows 32bit will show a maximum of 4GB total RAM, that includes graphics RAM. Check if your GFX are using the rest, intel or other turbocache might do this as suggested above or you may have 1.5GB GFX card(s)?

cherryghost

cpu-dude wrote: »

Well you should get the full use of the 4GB but it depends on what you'll be doing on your computer. I haven't seen a 2GB stick of RAM only show up as 1344 before... is it definately the correct type for your laptop?

show me a pc with 1337mb of ram and i'll be impressed.


is there a way to change the memory footprint in the bios for the card? I dont think there is, but it sounds like a very strange case indeed.

Solitaire

cherryghost wrote:

show me a pc with 1337mb of ram and i'll be impressed.

the_syco

sdonn wrote: »

Windows 32bit will show a maximum of 4GB total RAM, that includes graphics RAM.

I doubt it, since the kernel of 32bit windows only supports 3.4GB's of RAM.

PogMoThoin

the_syco wrote: »

I doubt it, since the kernel of 32bit windows only supports 3.4GB's of RAM.

Nope, the 32 bit kernel supports 4,294,967,295 bytes or 4 GB of byte-addressable memory in total. From this You deduct the ram used by the gpu and other devices to arrive at around 3.2-3.5GB

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

Windows XP 32bit should show the full 4GB (but not be available for use) since Service Pack 3, Vista shows it since Service Pack 1

Solitaire

IIRC XP always assumes the video framebuffer will always take at least 512MB and other addressable caches together are allocated a minimum of 256MB, so the addressable RAM in XP32 always caps at 3.25GB (unless you have a big framebuffer... but if you have a GPU with 1GB GDDR you prolly need 64bit OS anyway :P) I think Vista32 is a little smarter with its safety allocations and can get up to ~3.4GB if you're lucky.

Gran Hermano

If it was my laptop I'd stick Windows 7 64bit on a second partition and have the option to dual boot. It's a quick install and the 64bit OS should be faster.

griffdaddy

Using Ubuntu 64 bit from a dual-boot now and it picks up 3.7gig ram. I dunno, what's going on in Vista with the video card. Ubuntu 64 is deadly by the way!

the_syco

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Windows XP 32bit should show the full 4GB (but not be available for use) since Service Pack 3, Vista shows it since Service Pack 1

Interesting. But what use is the memory if it's not available for use? Wouldn't people falsely then assume that Windows is using all 4GB's, as it can see all 4GB's?