3gb usable out of 4gb

[Adam Kishta]

So I upgraded my ancient Lenovo ThinkPad z61t laptop to 4gb from 2gb and in task manager its saying only 3gb is usable and 1gb is hardware reserved. What does it mean by hardware reserved and is there a way to get that 1gb back because you know having 4gb of memory these days is kind of nice.

Specs:
Lenovo ThinkPad z61t 9440-A23
Windows 10 Home 64 bit
Intel Core 2 T5500 1.66GHz

 

[nymzy]

are you using a 32bit version of windows? if so, windows can only use 3,2gb of ram

to check this click on computer-properties and look for system type

 

[ddpruitt]

http://bfy.tw/1ACx

 

[Adam Kishta]

are you using a 32bit version of windows? if so, windows can only use 3,2gb of ram

to check this click on computer-properties and look for system type

no its 64 bit I know for a fact

 

[NeilBobT]

Some old motherboards, despite saying they support 4Gb of memory, can only actually use around 3.2Gb even with a 64 bit operating system.

I had the same problem years ago with one of the original Athlon 64s, Windows Vista x64 and then Windows 7 x64, and no amount of fiddling with BIOS settings would make it use the full 4Gb.

With that said, have you tried accessing the BIOS to see if there is any setting to change?

 

[helpstar]

That's the onboard graphics shared memory and other hardware, totally normal. Could try to reset the motherboard.
Update bios

Search for remap or similar in bios

 

[Adam Kishta]

Some old motherboards, despite saying they support 4Gb of memory, can only actually use around 3.2Gb even with a 64 bit operating system.

I had the same problem years ago with one of the original Athlon 64s, Windows Vista x64 and then Windows 7 x64, and no amount of fiddling with BIOS settings would make it use the full 4Gb.

With that said, have you tried accessing the BIOS to see if there is any setting to change?

Is there anything specific that I'm supposed to look for in the bios and why when I had only 2gb of ram I didn't have any reserved.

 

[helpstar]

Search for remap or similar in bios