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December 27th, 2008 21:00
XPS 600 RAM Upgrade
Hello,
I decided I wanted to upgrade my system RAM from 2Gb to 4GB so I purchased the additional 2Gb from Dell. My problem is...
After installing the additional 2Gb of RAM my system only appears to be recognizing 2Gb. After looking under msinfo.exe in the run menu the "total physical memory" indicates 4GB but only 1.5Gb is available (I am assuming that my system is only using .5Gb) so the additional 2Gb is "visible" but not in use by XP.
I looked in the BIOS and is sees the 4Gb.
I tried to trouble shoot the issue so I removed the extra (old) RAM and used the new RAM in slots 1 and 3 again the available memory remains the same at 1.5Gb and total physical memory is 2Gb so it's not the RAM itself.
After doing research on the web it appears that the maximum RAM for XP (32 bit) is 4Gb (theoretical) so I am assuming some of the RAM I installed should be used by XP.
Am I correct? Should my system be able to accept the additional RAM or is this a hardware issue with my system?
fireberd
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December 28th, 2008 03:00
According to the Dell manual the maximum memory is "2GB or 8GB" and from past posts on the forum, on systems that show that - in some cases - it means if you have a 32 bit OS the max is 2GB, if you have a 64 bit OS then the max is 8GB. From what you are saying that goes along with what you are seeing. I can't explain Dell's logic about that, but I know there were posts on the old Dell users forum with this exact same issue.
On systems that do not have the memory limitation, if you install 4GB on a 32 bit OS you will usually see about 3.2GB as the rest is used by system, video, etc.