Hi i bought a laptop with a 4gb ram .I later changed the os it came with it now shows that i have 3gb?

the os it came with was vista home premium and i changed it to vista ultimate. How do change it back to 4gb Hi i bought a laptop with a 4gb ram .I later changed the os it came with it now shows that i have 3gb?
What you've done is installed a 32-bit Operating System. For your laptop to recognise 4GB of RAM you need to install a 64-bit Operating System.Hi i bought a laptop with a 4gb ram .I later changed the os it came with it now shows that i have 3gb?
Hello,



It seems you have a 64-bit Laptop. The Vista Home Premium that came with it was probably 64-bit, so it recognized the ram. The Vista Ultimate however is mostly likely 32-bit, which will run on your computer, but can only recognize up to 3gb of ram. Your best bet, if you want to use that ram, is to buy a 64-bit OS, or go back to your original



Ah, it seems micksmixxx got to it before I did
Did you install the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate? 4GB of RAM can only be accessed by a 64-bit operating system. If the OS is the 32-bit version you will only see 3 to 3.5 GB of RAM. I believe Vista Ultimate comes with both the 64-bit and 32-bit version on either the same disk or in the same package. Try reinstalling the OS and make sure you use the 64-bit version.
If you installed a 32-bit Operating System 3gb to 3.5gb is the max amount of memory. You can buy a 64Bit Os, then your 4Gb will show. Or you can use the recovery disk supplied with you laptop this will place the previous OS on the laptop again.
micksmixxx appears to be right: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archive