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[ptar]

i have a problem with my toshiba satellite pro which i bought.i upgraded the memory to 4gb from3gb.in the bios it shows 4gb but when u boot the windows it shows 2.87 which is equally to 3gb. this happens in windows xp sp2 and sp3 platforms.but wen in vista sp1 it shows correctly 4gb.

pls anyone help

reguards:

peter

[ChristopherC · Accepted solution]

You may be running into the memory limitation inherent in 32-bit operating systems and hardware.  See THIS article for an explanation.  The difference between the installed memory indicated and the usable memory is the address space taken by memory mapped I/O devices such as graphics controllers.  A 32-bit system has only 4GB of address space available.  The memory mapped I/O address space subtracts from that 4GB and reduces the amount of RAM that the system can 'see'.