The Acer Guy Forum

The Acer Guy Forum » General Discussion

1. 

   Posted by: Starnamer
   Member

   OK, before anyone says, I know all about 32-bit OS's only being only able to access a 4Gb address space, but I also know about Physical Address Extension (PAE) which allows a 32-bit OS to access the space above 4Gb. I also know that some memory is reseved for buffers, registers etc so all memory may not be available.

   Having said all that, I have 2 laptops on my desk at present, an Acer 8920G and a Dell E6400. Both have 4Gb physical memory. The Dell, running XP, reports about 3.5Gb of ram (3620866K) while the Acer, running Windows 7, only report 3Gb (3070M).

   So the question is why the Acer doesn't appear to be using any of the 'top' 1Gb while the Dell manages to make half of it available?

   Is there some setting to change somewhere? I can't see anything in the BIOS and have tried enabling PAE (although I didn't really expect that to work as it's meant for memory above the 4Gb limit).

   Or is the system actually already using the extra and just not reporting it to Windows 7?

   As the title says, this is more of a puzzle than a problem, since the real answer (if I actually had applications that needed all that memory) is to switch to 64-bit.

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   Posted by: nozick
   Member

   I would suspect the missing 512 mb is assigned for use by the graphic card.

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   Posted by: u6b36ef
   Member

   Yeah it must be the way the different BIOS's on the laptops assign hardware reserve. Seriously don't worry, 3GB on Acer is norm.

   Look at stuff like Sisoft Sandra, and CPU-Z to see all your ram in place.

   U6b36ef.

   Posted 2 weeks ago #

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