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I'm on a Windows 7 laptop with 4GBs of RAM, but due to chipset limitations in the laptop itself I am unable to use more than 3.3GBs despite running 64-bit Windo
by trezor 17y ago
I'm on a Windows 7 laptop with 4GBs of RAM, but due to chipset limitations in the laptop itself I am unable to use more than 3.3GBs despite running 64-bit Windows. Pretty annoying, but not unbearable.
I'm guessing it is a decent mixture of cheap/old chipsets in the laptops sold and the OS itself.
- pmjordan 17y agoIt's unlikely to be the chipset's fault unless it's a very old laptop - it's the BIOS' job to trigger the "hoisting" of physical memory that overlaps the PCI address space so it lies above 0xFFFFFFFF once ACPI etc. have been initialised. Laptop/motherboard makers pay notoriously little attention to the BIOS, so features like this often stay disabled. Have you checked for a BIOS update? Interestingly, this also means that any memory that already lies beyond the 4GB barrier will be visible to the OS (64-bit or PAE) even without hoisting (so you'd see 7.3GB of 8GB) - unfortunately, upgrading to >4GB is expensive in Laptops at the moment. (4GB modules cost over 4x as much as 2GB DIMMs)
- InclinedPlane 17y agoI have the same problem currently (Lenovo T60, 4gb ram, only 3gb usable, x64 OS). In my case it's not the chipset's fault per se but rather a design limitation put in place by Lenovo. it's very annoying and certainly reduces the chances that my next laptop will be a Lenovo but on the other hand it's not exactly the worst thing in the world.