Why is usable RAM less than total RAM?

Posted by D Connors on Super User See other posts from Super User or by D Connors
Published on 2009-10-11T21:27:52Z Indexed on 2010/06/13 14:43 UTC
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windows-vista

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Troubleshooting

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memory

My girlfriend bought a laptop last week. It's a core 2 duo with 4 GB We installed vista 64bit, and one of the first things we did was right click on "My computer" to see gthe properties. Immediately we noticed something strange about her RAM, the line said: Installed memory (RAM): 4,00 GB (3,68 GB usable)

I told her not to worry, thinking it must be something about the laptop hardware (considering her vista installation came from the same DVD as mine, and I never noticed anything like that on my 4 GB desktop). One hour ago, it got worse. We looked at Properties again, and it now says: Installed memory (RAM): 4,00 GB (2,98 GB usable)

What does that mean? Are those 1,02 GB missing or being used by the system?

EDIT: There is a possibility that the sytem information is wrong. I just noticed that it reports an intel T6500 processor, when it's actually a T6400. How can I find out how much RAM is really available to the system?

EDIT2: Checking the resource monitors, it says 1003 MB are reserved for the hardware. Is that good or bad? Thanks

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