Vista 32bit, and not seeing 4Gb of ram

[MrE]

Hey folks, I hope there is an easy answer for this one. I am running the RTM of Vista Ultimate and decided to bump up from 2gb to 4gb of ram. Motherboard BIOS shows me all 4Gb, and, according to the conflicting reports I've read, I should be able to see at least 3.25Gb of it, but no dice. All that shows is 2048. Sigh. Any help would be appreciated.

-E

 

[drizzt81]

Mike Blas has written an excellent article on this subject that I find easy to understand. It is also linked in the sticky labeled "...FAQ..."

Now, only seeing 2GB is rather extreme. What hardware are you running?

 

[MrE]

CM Praetorian w 750watt TT Toughpower PSU
Intel Conroe Core2 Duo E6700 @ 2.81Ghz /Silverstone SST-NT06
Asus P5B-VM + 2Gb Corsair XMS DDR2 @4.4.4.12
XFX 7900GTX Extreme 512Mb Video [700/1600]
74Gb WD Raptor 10K SATA & 400Gb WD4000YR RE2 SATA

And heres some more strangeness to it. I've loaded the latest Beta BIOS dated 12/18/2006 that was supposed to address a problem when enabling the Memory Map Feature. Well, with that feature enabled, my BIOS can see all 4Gb. Vista shows 2047. So, if I disable the Memory Map Feature from within the BIOS, I see 2881Mb and Vista also recognizes 2881Mb. Hmm, so it looks to point to the Intel 965 board not addressing the memory in such a way as to allow Vista access. I'm at a loss at the moment, but maybe the solution is to kick this Asus MB to the curb?

-E

 

[LstBrunnenG]

2.8 GB isn't bad from a 32-bit Windows install. Most 32-bit installs only give 3 to 3.5 GB anyway.

If you want all the RAM, just install the x64 version.

 

[MrE]

If you want all the RAM, just install the x64 version.

Understood and I wish I could. But two things stopped me from going 64 which I may have to revisit once the commercial versions are being sold in stores:

1) I've already registered this copy
2) Driver support for 64 bit is spotty at best

Oh, and the Joy of reloading everything over again. *Sigh* I just might despite the migration pains.
Ah well, guess I should be happy at the moment. This memory is flippen expensive for only a meager 800mb more system ram. Ah well.

-E

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Understood and I wish I could. But two things stopped me from going 64 which I may have to revisit once the commercial versions are being sold in stores:

1) I've already registered this copy
2) Driver support for 64 bit is spotty at best

Oh, and the Joy of reloading everything over again. *Sigh* I just might despite the migration pains.
Ah well, guess I should be happy at the moment. This memory is flippen expensive for only a meager 800mb more system ram. Ah well.

-E

I don't see any hardware in your sig that should have issues with XP x64. I'd say go for it. The XP x64 driver support was spotty last year maybe, but things have most definitely improved over time, and just might get a little bit better with Vista x64 coming into availability in roughly 2 weeks or so.

Doesn't mean we'll see a dump of XP x64 drivers, nor does it mean Vista x64 drivers will be backwards compatible for XP x64, but hey, you can get XP x64 for around $64 these days - when was the last time you could buy a retail version of a Microsoft OS brand new in the box (non-upgrade version) for that kind of money?

I say do some research for the specific hardware on your machine; I'll bet you find nearly perfect support if it's all new components, but yes, you might find some issues. The only way to know is do the research and see.

Personally, I have 100% support nowadays with the Core 2 Duo laptop I bought in November for XP x64 and Vista x64 as well. No issues whatsoever, and with XP x64 it's decidely faster, even with 32 bit applications, probably because XP x64 is based on the Server 2K3 codebase and it's damned fast...

And you get access to all your RAM, of course.

As for migration issues, say hello to True Image or some other imaging application. Install it, install the applications, tweak it to perfection, and wham, never do it again. You'd also save your current setup perfectly just in case you do encounter driver issues that force you to drop that XP x64 from consideration in the long run.

 

[djnes]

Oh, and the Joy of reloading everything over again. *Sigh* I just might despite the migration pains.

That's why, when considering a new platform, you need to do the proper reading and research. This memory "barrier" has been around for quite some time, and as been asked literally countless times on here as well. Windows XP64 had some driver issues when it was released, and most seem to have been resolved. Vista64, with any hope, should be even better, driver-wise.

What I never understood was, if someone has a real need for 4 GB on a desktop, such as a high end 3D modeling app of some sort, I would have though the documentation for that app would have clearly laid out that a 64 bit OS was needed. Other than those apps, there's no real need or reason to get 4 GB of memory right now, aside from e-wang enlargement. The money spent on the extra 2 GB of memory could have gone to other parts.

 

[MrE]

Actually, I knew about the 4Gb Physical limit with 32Bit OS, but supposedly Vista was better about addressing. I expected to see 3.25Gb and in my original post, I still only saw 2Gb. It seems that the Memory Remap feature in the BIOS had to be disabled in order to see over 2Gb in Vista which I hadn't known until after my post.


-E

 

[LstBrunnenG]

I'm curious as to what you have that doesn't have 64-bit drivers - are you speaking from experience, or letting the rants of others get to you?

I migrated to XP64 about a year ago. At the time, there were only two things that weren't supported by the OS - my TV tuner, which I wasn't really using anymore anyway, and my scanner, which worked just as well with my notebook. Then in June of '06 they released 64-bit drivers for the scanner (big surprise, seeing as the manufacturer wasn't one of the big ones) and everything I have now outside that TV tuner is supported.

So, while a lot of people may say that 64-bit driver support is "spotty," it really depends on you and your hardware as to whether you'll have a problem.

 

[MrE]

Printer Drivers. HP has stated they will release Vista drivers for 32bit in the near future, but haven't claimed support for the 64bit versions of Vista. And the likelyhood of HP releasing a 64 bit driver for my USB scanner is NIL.

Casio Exilim camera drivers are non existent. But, I've found that I don't need to use their proprietary drivers for Vista to recognize the camera. Did not know that before upgrading to 32bit.

Also, driver signing is a must. You cannot run a non certified driver in Vista64 as I understand it. This will cut down on running a beta driver to fix an issue with certain games. This by far gave me the greatest pause. There have been many instances where a beta driver fixed a graphics glitch that kept a game from running.

The current drivers for Creative's X-FI series cards are a bit more stable on the 32bit platform than their 64bit counterparts. This was another reason I decided to go 32 bit for the moment, though it is something I could live without for the time being. I could always use the embedded sound card until Creative released a working driver, say, in 8 months from now.

I did a lot of investigation when I was deciding 32bit vs 64bit, and at that time ( November) decided that I'd stick it out with Vista 32Bit until 64bit's driver database stabilized for the drivers I need. I am aware of the robustness of 64 bit, but I cannot be without things like my printer/scanner for too long. I knew the limitations of memory limit for 32bit OS before the upgrade always figuring on upgrading the OS in the future.


-E

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Well, if you can find XP x64 drivers for your printer, there's a 99% chance they'll work on Vista x64 because HP already has the digital signature on 'em. I have a craptacular HP Deskjet D1320 printer - all of $23.96 at Wal-Mart recently. Got it home, no Vista support obviously, but...

Since I run not only XP x64 but Vista x64 also, I figured I'd give the XP x64 drivers a shot and downloaded the latest ones (I never use the ones on any manufacturer provided CD). They wouldn't install properly, of course, meaning running the setup.exe file so...

I ran the installer, and when it got to the point where it informed me my OS was the wrong one, I left that dialogue box onscreen, went digging into my Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp directory, found the hpwebrelease directory, copied the whole directory to the Desktop, and then closed the installer dialogue box (after which that hpwebrelease directory was deleted automagically).

I then plugged in the printer and when it went looking to install the drivers, I pointed the hardware wizard to the hpwebrelease directory on the Desktop. Wham bam, thank you Ma'am, I got a working printer. Tip: if you try this methodology yourself, don't point it to the hpwebrelease\drivers directory because that's not where the driver .inf file is; it's in the root directory, meaning hpwebrelease.

I've had a bunch of people report to me this method works - and obviously it's the only way to do it with XP x64 drivers since the installer (setup.exe) simply won't work, and there's no compatibility mode for old drivers to work with newer OSes, actually.

It either works or it doesn't, so I wanted to offer up my experience as an example.

HP is pretty good about 64 bit drivers across most all of their product line, sooo... it's worth a shot.

There is the issue of drivers overall that stops most people from wanting to mess with Vista x64 - that's the primary reason. Second, and way way down the list, is application compatibility, but that's another thread entirely.

When Vista is finally released in just over 2 weeks, we'll see a shitload of drivers start to appear almost out of thin air - not only on the manufacturer's websites, but also on Windows Update. This has already been made public knowledge back when Vista went RTM. Jim Allchin spoke about it at the Windows Vista blog a few days after RTM hoping to quell the paranoia of people interested in and focusing only on that aspect of Vista's release.

I have no issues with Vista, but then again, I'm not a typical PC owner. I got a bit lucky with this laptop I currently have with full support, but then again it wasn't really luck: I knew what to look for and when I found it, especially at the price I got it at, I pounced on it.