P5w-dh

[TRICKPLAYER]

I have 4 1 gb sticks of Crucial ddr2 8500 in my board, a P5W-DH, in system information on bios it says 4096 total, appropriated 896 mb available 3200 mb, I am using windows vista home premium by the way, 32 bit, I expected that of operating system, but expected all memory available in bios, is their something I need to adjust?

[CCT]

Is there a Memory Remapping option in BIOS and is it Enabled?

edit: from what I read, 32 bit systems will have the motherboard resources use the 'appropriated' ram and leave the rest for Windows.

related thread:

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:...lnk&cd=5&gl=ca

[Platypus]

Yes, the BIOS is reporting the amount of the 32 bit address space that has to be set aside for hardware adaptor memory addresses (PCIe adaptors etc). This address space can't be used for system memory, same principle as the top 384K of memory on the original PC, only 640K was accessible as system memory. As CCT says, if there is a memory re-mapping option available, the memory can be remapped above 4G to be potentially available as PAE memory. I don't remember off the top of my head if Home Premium can have PAE mode enabled to benefit from that, and I'm just off to work so I don't have time to look it up...

[Ferrit]

It may also be a bios update is needed.
Mine needed it before it displayed the full amount correctly
Some bios's as I understand actually have a memory remapping
function and other's do it automatically. Also of note a friend had
4X1 gig on an Asus.It wasn't seeing it correctly and he did a bios
update and it then recognized it correctly.
But it began crashing significantly and he had to up the voltage
to the ram to stableize it again on 4 sticks

[TRICKPLAYER]

Thanks for all the input the memory remapping was the cure, enabled for 64 bit os and diabled for 32 bit os.