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Dell M90 only supports 3.3GB of RAM. - Page 2

post #21 of 42
5/9/07 at 7:41pm
Cool good to know. Newegg is out of stock on that bad boy memory right now. I guess I have to wait. Not a big deal considering my games are not in yet, and neither is my laptop.
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post #22 of 42
5/9/07 at 8:12pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by suryad
Not a big deal considering my games are not in yet, and neither is my laptop.
Uhmm, I hope you are aware of the fact that there is no game, nor any consumer application, that would benefit in any significant way from having more than 2GB of memory, under just about any halfway realistic scenario.
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post #23 of 42
5/9/07 at 10:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirx
Uhmm, I hope you are aware of the fact that there is no game, nor any consumer application, that would benefit in any significant way from having more than 2GB of memory, under just about any halfway realistic scenario.
Do you consider Painter and Photoshop to be consumer applications?
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post #24 of 42
5/9/07 at 10:54pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisLilley
Do you consider Painter and Photoshop to be consumer applications?
I don't know much about Painter, but Photoshop is kind of an in-between case. In a way, no, I would say Photoshop is really a tool for professionals, in the sense that not many consumers are able to use it proficiently in any reasonable sense of that word (for a number of different reasons, but that's another story...). So, yeah, many "consumers" "use" Photoshop, but many, many of them really don't know what they are doing... Anyway, with Photoshop, if you are actually finding yourself bumping against memory limitations on a 2GB machine, then you must be doing some quite serious work with it. I have never missed that additional gig of memory working in Photoshop on my M60. But, yes, I would describe myself as one of those incompetent consumers in that regard myself, in case you ask, so keep that in mind... Also, on a standard XP system, a single application cannot have more than 2GB anyway. Well, o.k., then there's the issue of heap fragmentation coupled with Photoshop insisting on geeting large contiguous chunks of memory, so the additional memory can help in such a situation. But again, if you worry about those kinds of issues, then chances are you are a pro, and not somebody worrying about playing games on his/her machine...
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post #25 of 42
5/9/07 at 11:10pm
All in all, you'll need 64-bit processor to get all 4GB of RAM.
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post #26 of 42
5/9/07 at 11:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by .PoNeH
All in all, you'll need 64-bit processor to get all 4GB of RAM.
That's not enough. You also need a fully 64bit compatible chipset and BIOS, neither of which is the case with current laptops.
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post #27 of 42
5/10/07 at 1:59am
Thread Starter 
1) A 32 bit operating system can access more than 4GB of RAM, but a 32 bit application can only access 2GB. (I know from experience Windows 2003 32 bit can access at least 16GB of RAM with the /PAE option)

2) Wether 32 or 64 bit OS, the hardware has to fully support it. Otherwise you end up with with an M90 that only makes 3.3GB of RAM available to it.

That said, short of some high end engineering applications, that most users will never see there are no applications compiled for 64 bit operation that would actually use more than 2GB of RAM anyway. Besides, a 64 bit application will likely use twice as much RAM as it's 32 bit counterpart. Making the 4GB of RAM capacity on our laptops a moot point.

What I use the memory for is running several applications that consume 256 to 1GB of RAM each. VMWare is a good example of this, I will have as many as 6-7 virtual machines running at the same time. Even with 3.3GB of usable RAM I still find myself hurting from time to time.
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post #28 of 42
5/10/07 at 3:59am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirx
That's not enough. You also need a fully 64bit compatible chipset and BIOS, neither of which is the case with current laptops.
Whoa, hold it! As of today, Santa Rosa is out so this is no longer true .
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post #29 of 42
5/10/07 at 9:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by suryad
Cool good to know. Newegg is out of stock on that bad boy memory right now. I guess I have to wait. Not a big deal considering my games are not in yet, and neither is my laptop.


http://shop3.outpost.com/product/5247587
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post #30 of 42
5/10/07 at 10:09am
I'm confused... I thought the QuadroFX has dedicated memory...?
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post #31 of 42
5/10/07 at 12:18pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadebeard
I'm confused... I thought the QuadroFX has dedicated memory...?
Of course it has. This discussion has nothing to do with shared video memory.
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post #32 of 42
5/10/07 at 12:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadebeard
I'm confused... I thought the QuadroFX has dedicated memory...?
It does. We aren't talking about where the physical memory resides (otherwise, with 2 Gigs, you would have only 1.25 gigs available). Its that there is apparently some chunk of the address space blocked out, corresponding to 256M plus your video RAM size; and that system RAM there is not available. Its not that it gets used as video memory - its unavailable. This happens at the hardware level. So, Linux has the same limit.
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post #33 of 42
5/10/07 at 12:25pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by xccess21
for anyone want to know why read this
http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblo...05/is3gbenough

Its a good article. Is there a better one? In particular this

Quote:
(Yes, I know the x86 architecture supports a separate IO address space, which should in theory avoid this problem. However, for reasons I won't go into, there are good reasons to map IO devices into memory address, so a lot of devices end up not living in IO space.)

(my emphasis) is not very helpful.
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post #34 of 42
5/10/07 at 12:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by twaldher
1) A 32 bit operating system can access more than 4GB of RAM,
Yeah, if it's a little bit more than 32bit, it can. In the case the the server OS you mention, that makes use of the fact that Intel's Pentium IV/Xeon and higher processors actually provide for 36bit addressing, which is what the /PAE switch enables the OS to take advantage of.
Quote:
Originally Posted by twaldher
but a 32 bit application can only access 2GB.
That is not correct, kind of, anyway.If you use the /3GB boot.ini switch, then applications can access up to 3GB of memory. Having said that, I never had much luck with that; it didn't work properly in the original Windows XP (caused bluescreens after a while), was supposedly fixed with SP2, but I still got crashes with /3GB enabled even in SP2, so I gave up on it...
Quote:
Originally Posted by twaldher
Besides, a 64 bit application will likely use twice as much RAM as it's 32 bit counterpart.
Nope, that's not true in general. It depends on what the app needs the memory for. A 64bit app is perfectly free to use 4-byte words for its internal data.
Quote:
Originally Posted by twaldher
What I use the memory for is running several applications that consume 256 to 1GB of RAM each. VMWare is a good example of this, I will have as many as 6-7 virtual machines running at the same time. Even with 3.3GB of usable RAM I still find myself hurting from time to time.
Yeah, I can hear you. Still, I wouldn't call that a standard usage scenario for a consumer...
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post #35 of 42
5/10/07 at 12:32pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisLilley
Whats less clear to me is whether this happens at the OS level or at the hardware level. So, does Linux have the same limit?
It happens at the hardware level, so, yes, Linux, or any other OS for that matter, including 64bit OS, have the same limit. I once had a really nice article on this whole issue, and I know I linked to it in an earlier post of mine, but I can find neither that post (well, big surprise there...), nor that website...
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post #36 of 42
5/10/07 at 1:05pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by m94mni
Whoa, hold it! As of today, Santa Rosa is out so this is no longer true .
Really? So, how's your Santa-Rosa based new laptop doing? I think it's going to be a few weeks until you can actually buy these things.
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post #37 of 42
5/10/07 at 1:22pm
It does. 512MB of it.
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post #38 of 42
5/10/07 at 7:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisLilley
It does. We aren't talking about where the physical memory resides (otherwise, with 2 Gigs, you would have only 1.25 gigs available). Its that there is apparently some chunk of the address space blocked out, corresponding to 256M plus your video RAM size; and that system RAM there is not available. Its not that it gets used as video memory - its unavailable. This happens at the hardware level. So, Linux has the same limit.
Right, thanks for clearing that up!
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post #39 of 42
5/11/07 at 1:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisLilley
Its a good article. Is there a better one? In particular this
thereis, but you can try to google em down
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post #40 of 42
6/13/11 at 8:21am

 


Hi,

 

I have a Dell M90 which I use for 3d CAD as you can see from my website http://www.thebigconsultant.com

 

CAN ANYONE WHO HAS FIXED THIS PLEASE HELP ME

 

I have 4GB installed, but only 2GB is visible... and this is in Win7 64Bit!!??

 

I have installed 64 bit Windows7 to try and correct this. But the problem still persists.

- However, I do know that users who have reported this problem have managed to get 3.25 GB of memory available. How?

 

I cant seem to get more than 2GB visible to the desktop, which is really annoying as my 3D CAD uses tonnes of memory!!

 

I have completed all of the windows updates, but I still have a problem. I am unsure what to do, as I think that I have the latest BIOS (rev AO8) and the memory that I have put in there should be fine.

 

I really need to access 4GB to use the system for CAD, as it was intended.

 

Can anybody please help? 

Kind regards, Bid

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