I was configuring a laptop on the inter-web, and while i was browsing i saw a message that said that "...4GB of memory may not be available due to system requirements, actual variance depends on system configuration." I entered a live chat and was told that the 4GB of RAM would be compatible with all configurations of the laptop, but then i was told that Vista Home Premium (32bit) only uses up to 2.5GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate (32bit) only uses up to 3.5GB of RAM.
Does the compatibility depend on the OS or the system configuration or both?
If the compatibility depends on the system configuration or both, are these configurations compatible with 4GB of RAM, and how much RAM will it utilize? Will the laptop be able to utilize all 4GB?
15.4in Notebook
Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Core Duo 2 T8300 2.4GHz (3MB Cache 800MHz FSB)
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
160GB 7200RPM (8MB Cache)
8x Dual Layer Burner
4GB Dual Channel DDR SO-DIMM @ 667MHz 2 x 2048
And if 4GB of RAM isnt compatible, does that mean i virtually have 0 RAM?
Would you just recommend me to get 2GB of RAM?
Answers & Comments
Verified answer
All 32-bit operating systems have a technical limitation (i.e. it is not a Windows problem), which only allows it to use 4 GB address space maximum. However, some available address space is used up by the BIOS and video card RAM, limiting the leftover space for RAM to 2.5-3.5 GB. The only ways to solve this are by using Physical Address Extension (an unnecessarily complicated process that I won't go into detail here) or upgrade to a 64-bit OS. Both have their limitations:
**64-bit - the future of OSes, but some software has trouble running on it, and you need to spend more money on a new OS
**32-bit w/ PAE (aka 36-bit) - allows you to keep your existing OS and most software still works, but some apps may break using this and the setup is a bit complex
I hope this chunk of information is helpful, I learned about this over the past few months when planning for a custom PC build.
4GB is ok with Vista, normally all Windows 32bit OS can address just a bit over 3GB due to the way the hardware addresses the upper memory reserved for devices.
With Vista SP1, it will report all 4Gb just it wont be using all of it, on an average system there should be around 3.25GB of working memory, but getting 4GB now saves you upgrading later when you upgrade to 64bit OS.
The extra memory wont do any harm, I have one system here with 8GB of memory that I multi boot between Linux, XP64, XP32, Vista 32 and Vista 64bits. They all work exept that XP32 will see only 3.5GB but creates no problem at all.
All of the RAM will be utilized, some of it will just not be available to the cpu through the chipset. It will be allocated to other things like the graphics card. All modern graphics cars use system RAM in addition to their onboard ram.
2gb should be good enough for almost anything, but if you are going to be running the newest games you might want to go with whatever you can get. RAM is cheap, and not having enough is a huge bottleneck.
Dont waste your money on no longer something. It says that the max it could help is 2Gb, so it could do 3 issues: it won't examine the two of the 2Gb sticks it is going to examine 1gb each and every of the 2Gb sticks it is going to crash and/or shrink to rubble the reminiscence sticks themselves My suggestion is to adhere with the 2Gb.
4gigs is the max on 32bit system.
64bit system should recognize over 4 gigs.
Good luck.