vote up 1 vote down star

Possible Duplicate:
Where did the other .8 GB of RAM go?

I just bought a used Macbook on eBay that came installed with 4 gb of ram. The first thing I did was installed Windows 7 using bootcamp. Here's where it gets weird. When I finally booted it up in Windows 7, I checked the Computer properties, and it said that there were 4 gb of ram but only 2.97gb usable. Why is that? Is there anything I can do about this?

flag

closed as exact duplicate by Diago♦ Oct 2 at 18:51
This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question.

2 Answers

vote up 4 vote down

Sounds like you have installed a 32 bit version of Windows. 32 bit versions can only access around 3Gb of RAM. The exact amount depends on other hardware that is installed. If you want to be able to use more than this then you need to install a 64 bit OS.

link|flag
2  
I'm going to make the wild guess that BFree has a 1GB video card or two 512MB video cards. – R. Bemrose Oct 2 at 18:34
vote up 2 vote down

The long, detailed answer requires some reading. It's worthwhile though.

http://blogs.msdn.com/hiltonl/archive/2007/04/13/the-3gb-not-4gb-ram-problem.aspx

(I would prefer to link to the article rather than simply copy-paste his content.)

link|flag

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.