I received a memory upgrade for my notebook today – the corporate IT bumped up its memory from 1GB to 4GB. Yay! Rebooted and checked my system information to see how much faster I can surf work.
Wow, 3.25 GB of RAM! Wait… 3.25? What happened to the other 0.75GB? Did the operating system hijack it?
Oh no, that wasn’t the reason. A quick check on the web revealed the answer: we’ve hit the limits of addressable memory space of a 32-bit microprocessor. Already? Wasn’t it a mere 16 years ago that the Intel 80386 (my first 32-bit computer) came with 1MB of RAM and a 4GB hard disk. Although the system had 4GB of RAM, memory addresses were reserved for devices with direct memory access, such as the video card and some peripherals.
There were workarounds such as PAE and such, but the cold truth was that we had to go to a 64-bit architecture to get access to more memory. Ah, the pace of technological innovation and how far we’ve come since the early days of the PC.
Hello bro,
The 32-bit OS you are using is the cause of the ‘missing’ memory. Don’t blame your hw, the CPU is ALREADY on 64bit.
;-p