Windows does not recognize my 4 GB of RAM

More than one will have been in this situation: a few months to buy a new computer intel pentium 4 type of 3000MHz memory wants more and goes out to buy an additional module of 1GB. At the store, however, and taking advantage of the RAM is so cheap, you change your mind. If the board supports up to 4GB, why not stretch a little further on spending and get some more leeway to experiment with virtual machines, computer graphics, computer forensics and other fancy stuff that serve to distinguish the user demanding a common hacker e-mule? At the end of the day RAM is what differentiates good techie, not megahertz of micro, and mistakenly believed. Back home, after unpacking and installing our two brand new Kingston 2GB modules, we encounter the first surprise. Windows XP only recognizes 3GB or at best something else. Perhaps one of the modules is faulty. Before we decided to test claims: first with one module, then the other, to know what fails. It turns out that they both work without problems. Repeating the tests with Linux have the same result.

Surprisingly, the BIOS itself is able to see four gigs of RAM.

Suddenly we realize that we are using 32-bit operating systems. Just do a few numbers for clues as to where you can ride the cause of the problem. 2 to the 32 gives 4,294,967,296 (4 GB), which is the maximum address space of memory. We did not have all of it because the system reserves a gig to map devices like graphics cards and PCI components. At the cost of a drop in performance can resort to various tricks that allow us to leverage the maximum RAM supported. To find out for sure we have only to do the same tests as before with a 64-bit, with a theoretical memory address around 64 GB. No need to buy a very expensive version of Windows for servers. Not even have to make the slightest change in the configuration of our software. Just off the Internet a Linux Live-CD for 64-bit architectures and boot your computer with it. Then, using the performance monitor or simple'cat proc / meminfo 'bash console, see our four gigabytes of RAM alive and kicking. This depletion is a phenomenon very similar to what occurred a few years ago with the famous memory limit of 640 KB of Microsoft DOS.

This time the fault is not Bill Gates. In 1978, when the vax was released, the first 32-bit computer, and 64 kilobytes of memory seemed to us an astronomical figure even for the most powerful mainframe, the idea of ​​exhausting the maximum address space of 4 GB would have only occurred to the writers of Star Trek. Matter of centuries, if ever. Three decades have passed since then, and we're on the other side of what then seemed to be the last frontier of the 32 bits. www.computacion-video.es.tl