"jakigui" wrote in message
news:b31c236f-7c71-4cee-834e-51b0b7d0b82c...
> i am using a core i7 920 2.6ghz with a P6TD Deluxe asus motherboard.
> i even go to MSCONFIG and tick maximum memory,but still it says
> only 3gb is usable. my vga is
> radeon hd 5750 1 gb but system has already shared 1275 mb of memory.
All 32-bit client versions of Windows (not just Vista/XP/7) have a 4GB
address space (64-bit versions can use much more). That's the
theoretical upper limit beyond which you can not go.
But you can't use the entire 4GB of address space. Even though you
have a 4GB address space, you can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM.
That's because some of that space is used by hardware and is not
available to the operating system and applications. The amount you can
use varies, depending on what hardware you have installed, but can
range from as little as 2GB to as much as 3.5GB. It's usually around
3.1GB.
Note that the hardware is using the address *space*, not the actual
RAM itself. If you have a greater amount of RAM, the rest of the RAM
goes unused because there is no address space to map it to.
--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) since 2003
Ken Blake