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Before you go blaming it on a 32-bit OS, I'm running Windows 7 64-bit. I have 4x 1GB sticks of RAM installed. I recently RMA'd one stick and installed the replacement. It would seem that parts of my system are recognizing it and others aren't. Both System Properties and dxdiag show the full 4GB, but task manager and rainmeter are only reporting 3GB. What's numbers should I trust and how can I fix this?

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Can you post more info about your system? Make and model? What chipset does your system have? AFAIK, most Athlon X2 chipsets should support > 4 GiB of RAM. – afrazier May 11 '10 at 15:00

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A piece of hardware may have mapped some memory below 4GB. You can use the tools in this blog post to investigate further.

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This is probably the culprit. If the chipset supports memory addresses beyond 4 GiB (some don't), then there should be an option in the BIOS to control memory remapping. – afrazier May 11 '10 at 14:59
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I think your culprit might be a video processor that's dedicating some of your main memory to itself. This might be tunable in your BIOS configuration if you want more for your system (and less dedicated to video if this is the case).

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From my (limited) knowledge, I thought this only happened with integrated video cards. This setup is a desktop computer with a GeForce 8600GT installed. Could this still be the case? – sgtFloyd Feb 2 '10 at 15:58
I think you're correct in that your card has its own memory. Sorry that wasn't it. If you're worried some of your memory might be bad you could run Memtest 86+ memtest.org as a diagnostic. – Tyler Szabo Feb 2 '10 at 18:27

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