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I have built my own computer with an athlon 64 4000 Geforce 7800 gtx and four gigs of Ram, but windows xp home edition SP2, Which is an OEM copy, only recognizes 3 gigs.
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some questions for you..
1). Does your motherboard support 4GB of RAM?
2). Does your BIOS see all 4 GB of RAM?
3). Have you tried to try booting up with only one stick to see if each RAM stick is recognaized on its own?
4 Gb RAM is the maximum that XP Home can use, so no problem there
How much RAM is recognised in BIOS? If less than 4 Gb there are several possibilities ....
One of your RAM modules is not inserted correctly - remove all the RAM and reinstall.
1 Gb of RAM is bad - I am guessing that you have 4 x 1 Gb sticks so run Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool to check out all the RAM. Alternatively take out one stick at a time leaving 3 Gb installed - at some time during that process the reported RAM may drop to 2 GB indicating that the stick you just installed may be faulty.
Your motherboard does not support 4 GB RAM - check the manual.
One of the RAM modules may not be compatible with the other RAM modules although I guess you bought a couple of matched pairs to run as dual channel?
I vaguely remember reading that some BIOS/motherboards do not correctly report the amount of RAM installed, but I could well be off track here.
yes, all four gigs are recognized by my bios, i bought all 4 gigs at the same time in sets of 2. i installed the xp pro x 64 trial copy and all 4 gigs were recognized there... is it just the XP home?
I think this is a fairly common problem - have read a considerable amount about this with other users but have never directly experienced it. Its not just XP Home, Pro is susceptable too. Don't know if its chipset specific, motherboard specific or memory specific but you are by no means the only one with the same problem. I've also read inferences that this is SP2 related but I can't confirm that nor would I dispute it.
hmmm... well i'm not sure what to do now... i want to thank everyone for helping me and welcoming me to the forums... if anyone else has some input i'm all ears.
Faced the same problem myself. BIOS recognises full 4 GB but WinXP Pro shows only 3 GB. Turned out that PCIx card was using 1GB RAM for itself & there was no way to turn it off (Dual CPU Opetron, nForce4 ASUS motherboard, 1GB x 4 GB DDR ECC Registered RAM, ASUS 6600 GT card).
If you would switch off the virtual memory (swap-file) Windows should "see" all 4 GB. The problem is that the barrier for Windows XP = 4GB, and it counts the swap-file in this.
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition supports up to 128 GB of physical RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory.
If you would switch off the virtual memory (swap-file) Windows should "see" all 4 GB. The problem is that the barrier for Windows XP = 4GB, and it counts the swap-file in this.
Arie, XP always recognises the RAM as 3 GB, even if my swap file is 0 or its 4 GB. If it is set to 4 GB, it should show physical RAM as 0.
Don't worry about measly 1 GB of RAM. If you are in the mood, go for WinXP 64 bit. It can recognise anything you can throw at it (for a couple of years at least )
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