Memory Management - Dude where's my RAM??

Dude, where's my RAM? (or, why don't I have 4GB?)

The Sean Blog — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:05:10 GMT

I ran into this exact issue yesterday, and intended to write a post. Fortunately, the ASKPERF Blog covers

re: Memory Management - Dude where's my RAM??

Billy Dhillon — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 02:39:53 GMT

If your ever skeptical about the RAM reading inside Task Manager/System Properties, Bring up "System Information" (Start->Run->Winmsd) and this will give you the true reading regardless if you have PAE enabled or not.

re: Memory Management - Dude where's my RAM??

JUAN CARLOS QUINTERO M. — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:19:16 GMT

tengo un portatil acer con 4 gb de ram en 2 tarjetas ddr2-2gb markvision bus 667 mhz con windows vista home premium preinstalado pero solo me reconoce 3.70 gb que hago para que me reconozca los 4 gb?gracias

e-mal:halcon1962@gmail.com

re: Memory Management - Dude where's my RAM??

Sharath — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:55:33 GMT

The amount of RAM reported by the System Information tool (msinfo32) is the actual

RAM that has been added to system. The size of the RAM shown in System Properties

dialog box is what is available to the system. The hardware needs to allocate

memory space to use for things like the PCI bus, BIOS, the video card and others.

This memory is not available to the OS. This is because when it actually allocates

for the physical RAM in the system, it has to skip the chunk that was blocked off

by the hardware. Thus the amount of memory which is shown in system properties is

(Actual RAM - Amount of RAM used by h/w). This value may differ depending on the

type and no. of h/w that is installed to a system. Adding the PAE switch will make

the OS to detect the entire 4 GB, as you can see in sysinfo.

There’s a known issue with the system properties not reporting the correct value,

as discussed in KB888664 <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888664/en-us> in Windows

XP SP2.

One should use the System Information tool (msinfo32) to obtain Total physical

memory size information