am i reading this wrong or am i missing ram?

[Beam]

hi i just upgraded my pc to have 4gigs of ram (my current system is vista home premium 64-bit) and when i right click my computer it reads that i have 4gigs in there but when i run a DXdiag it says this.



Memory: 2942MB RAM
Page File: 1701MB used, 4418MB available

and then when i ran another program it said i had 2.9gigs and 1.7gigs of ram on my video card, am i reading this wrong? or was i just screwed by the place i took my pc in to get upgraded?

[ApPy10]

DXDiag counts the number in a very strange way. Try it yourself! It adds used + available and counts RAM as part of swap, so, in my example, I have 2048 total RAM, and 2047 fixed swap = 4095
And used (378) + available (3612) = 3990 which is more or less the right figures.

[T.J.]

It is your GPU borrowing the RAM, but you should found out why...unless you're running some very intense graphic applications, it should not do so automatically...

[Beam]

DXDiag counts the number in a very strange way. Try it yourself! It adds used + available and counts RAM as part of swap, so, in my example, I have 2048 total RAM, and 2047 fixed swap = 4095
And used (378) + available (3612) = 3990 which is more or less the right figures.

hmm well that would explain it thanks alot =)

[Hockson]

In terms of solution it occurs because Vista is reporting correctly, where XP reported incorrectly. To explain, XP reported the full amount of memory in the computer. Vista reports the amount of memory available for use. Thus if you have BIOS shadowing or any of a 100 other BIOS settings on, they will use memory and ths it will not be seen.