Missing RAM in Windows XP

[Aimee]

I have a windows xp. I have just upgraded to 4Gb RAm from 1 GB RAM. Both 2 GB RAM chips are of same type. PC working fine with those RAM chips, as look in system properties , its only showing 3.25 GB RAM, not the full 4GB RAM. Why so? It should show full 4GB RAM in XP. Where is the missing RAM?

[shahid khan]

Yes Windows XP 32-bit having the RAM limit of 4gb. but If you use 32 bit OS, 4GB RAM is detected as 3.5GB RAM. Note not to mix different modules of RAM together. Different RAM chips may lead to potential problems. XP and Vista can only truly manage ~3GB of Physical RAM. 4GB is misleading.

[Neel23]

Yes , if you use windows xp 32 bit or older windows version , they won't recognize full 4gb of ram. It will always show 3GB of RAM only. Only Windows Vista 64 bit and XP 64 bit will recognize 4 GB and more RAM. You may just be looking at avaliable RAM, not the total. Ctrl-Shift-Esc, Click 'Performance' and look where it says 'Physical Memory> Total'

[Tillie]

Shared ram for onboard graphics. Check settings in bios. Try to use 64-bit version of windows xp . A quick Google search (which is usually my first resource) revealed that even though 32-bit XP can address 4GB of memory, that addressing includes all your devices. So the video card is actually addressing that same 4GB memory space, even though it's not actually accessing the system's RAM. Windows figures out how much address space is required for all devices, then uses the rest of the memory address space for your system's RAM.