64-Bit Windows 7 Shows 2.75GB Usable Ram out of 4GB

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TerminatorXT

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Jul 15, 2009
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I recently installed Windows 7 64-bit build 7600
and when I go into control panel, it shows that I have 4 GB installed
but 2.75 is usable....

does anyone have any answers

and yes its 64-bit for sure
 

ajcroteau

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Hey, I'm having the same issue but the available for me is different. I have a Toshiba laptop A305D-S6848 which originally came with 3 GB of Ram. Since then i've added another 1GB for a total of 4.

Up until this past weekend, I was running Vista x64 and it reported 4GB ram. This weekend however, I installed Windows 7 x64 and it reports 4GB Ram but only 3.87 GB usable.

I also have a desktop machine with 8GB Ram and it didn't specify whether or not some or all of the Ram was being used so i assumed that 100% is usable.

NOW, another thing i noticed is whenever i do a fresh install, i always give the OS the satisfaction of creating it's own partition, doing this in Windows 7 however, it also created a smaller 100MB partition for system resources. I'm under the assumption that if you don't allow Windows 7 to create this seperate partition, it will seperate a section of Ram for this. If this is the case however, then both the partition and the Ram have been seperated for the system. Again, this is just a theory, I could be completely wrong...

AJ
 
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If you use START ->All Programmes -> Accessories ->System Tools - > Resource Monitor ->Memory (Tab) Then a colour bar-chart and breakdown of all system memory is presented. Each section has an explanatory "bubble" if you hover over it (or the legend).

This should explain whether memory is seen or not, and how it is allocated.

If I use a dedicated graphics card with its own memory on my system (MSI DKA790gx), then only 2mb is shown as hardware reserved.

With an activated integrated graphics chip on the same system and no dedicated graphics card, the "Hardware Reserved" memory will include your video memory as well as other bits and pieces.

On my system I was able to allocate 512mb, but 770mb is shown as hardware reserved.

I guess the 50% additional hardware reserved memory is for internal additional video processing, but I'm not sure.

Another way to get to the bar chart is - right click the taskbar, choose "Start Task Manager", select the "Performance" tab and then the "Resource Monitor" button at the bottom of the window and then the "Memory" tab as before.
 
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