Installed RAM 20 GB (16 GB usable)

I have Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) OS installed. My motherboard is able to handle up to 32 GB of RAM.

I recently upgraded my computer to 20 GB of RAM, but the computer says installed RAM is 20 GB (16 GB usable).

I have four slots on the MB, and I installed two 8 GB RAM closest to the CPU and two 2 GB RAM on the remaining slots.

I made sure the RAM are the same (DDR3 1600 MHz)

What am I doing wrong? Why am I seeing this issue in my computer's Control Panel Home?

Just in case it matters, I also installed GTX 770 GPU 2 GB memory.

Here is the specification on my motherboard: .

6

3 Answers

Windows 7 Home Premium supports up to 16 GB of RAM. That is why only a certain amount is showing as usable.

Your computer supports the extra RAM and does detect it. It's a licensing issue in Windows that makes it only use 16 GB at a time.

Source: Memory Limits for Windows and Windows Server Releases, Physical Memory Limits: Windows 7

2

This list represents the amount of memory that the various hardware devices installed in your system have reserved so that they can communicate with the operating system. Of course, memory reserved for hardware is essentially locked and as such is not available to the memory manager.

Typically, the amount of hardware reserved memory ranges from 10 MB to 70 MB, but it can vary depending on the system's hardware configuration and might be several hundred MBs. Examples of components that can affect the amount of memory reserved include:

• System BIOS
• Motherboard resources, such as I/O advanced programmable interrupt controller (APIC)
• Sound cards or any other devices that require memory-mapped I/O
• PCI Express (PCIe) bus
• Video card
• Various chipsets
• Flash devices

Just for the verification, go to "Resource Monitor" and select the 'Memory' Tab. And look for this thing 'Hardware Reserved' which might be colored gray. It should tell how much memory is reserved for hardware (you can't release that memory).

2

click start, in RUN type msconfig then click > boot tab > advanced options > uncheck the boxes for maximum memory and CPU

Close msconfig

Restart

1

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