4GB memory

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 10:05:55AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> The computer I mentioned earlier has arrived.  Vista was rather
> ungenerous in repartitioning: the machine has a 320GB drive and Vista
> takes up 20GB but when asked to shrink the partition Vista would only
> allow that it could give up 135GB.  Defragging didn't change that.  If
> anyone has suggestions on this I'd be happy to hear them, but that's
> not my main reason for writing.

Partition magic and gparted can both work around that, as long as you
then fix the boot sector with the recovery console afterwards (this
means you have a real windows DVD, like either a real install disk or
the upgrade anytime (or something) DVD).

> I bought the machine with 4GB of memory (4 sticks of 1GB).  I wasn't
> surprised to see Vista displaying 3.2GB, although it amuses me to no
> end that you need 2GB to run it decently and you can't use more than
> 3GB ... that's a pretty small window of opportunity.  But I was
> surprised to find that Debian testing displays very much the same
> thing with "free", 3287MB even after I installed and booted kernel
> 2.6.24-1-686-bigmem.  I didn't change any boot params, do I need to?
> "lshw" lists the motherboard as a "OFM586" made by "Dell," which
> doesn't sound right, and it does see the 4GB.  The chipset is Intel.
> I'm hoping there's something fairly simple that I'm missing.  I don't
> believe there's a limitation in the BIOS, I looked there.  Any other
> suggestions welcome.

To get more than 3.2GB you need to enable remapping of the extra ram
above 4GB (memory hoist or whatever they called it on some systems).
Check the BIOS, it should have a setting for it on most systems.

Now if it is a Dell, then there may not be a BIOS option since they
aren't big on those. :)

-- 
Len Sorensen
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