Where did my RAM go??

Hi,
I've had this Acer Aspire 5100 for about 3 years now and it's treated me pretty good. About a year ago I upgraded the RAM to 4GBs. About 6 months ago I went from Vista to Win 7 HP via the upgrade disc. I was browsing my Control Panel and I went to System and noticed that out of the 4GB's of RAM installed only 2.25GB of Physical Memory is usable. The integrated video card is only 256MB on this model laptop so where is all the leftover RAM?
I've had people,(via Google) tell me that 32 bit systems can only use 3GB of RAM. I''ve had them tell me 4Gigs can be used. Which is it? I've had a so called tech at Future Shop tell me updating my BIOS will do nothing for enabling the missing RAM. I don't want to update the BIOS if it's useless to do so. For one, I don't know how, although I'm somewhat computer savvy, I still know that updating the BIOS improperly can put a dent in your day.
As you can tell. I've read and been told a lot of BS, so could someone steer me in the right direction, so I can recover the lost RAM, or understand who or what is using it on this machine.

 

32bit windows can only address 4GB of ram total.

Any reserved memory etc will be eaten and gfx memory is included in this space. Usually there might be memory remapping options in the bios but this is not accessable on laptops usually.

You should look into going 64bit.

 

You mean 1.75 GB is eaten up by what? I understand the video card or the integrated graphics, (because it's a laptop) eat up some. Mine is listed as 256MB on this model, but where does the rest go. I know you can pile on RAM in 64, but right now I'm trying to understand where this 1.75GB of RAM has gone on this laptop

 

It's eaten up by bad memory management and old styles of alocating resources that were not designed to operate at the edge of the maxiumum address space.

Eg the systems were designed to operate around the times of only a few megabytes of ram.

 

I did a little more research on my own and ended up at my Resource Monitor where it gives a pretty good picture of how the RAM is allocated. In my case,"System" says I have only 2302 of Physical Memory that is usable. The picture or image that I'm adding to this thread shows how the Physical Memory is broken down and I understand that. It also shows the RAM that I say is missing, but it's not. According to the Resource Monitor the 1794MB of memory is allocated to "Hardware Reserved". When I looked up what hardware reserved was about it more less came back with "it being used for the BIOS and other peripherals." Something like that anyway. If you can explain that "Hardware Reserved any better then go right ahead.
I suppose in the end the 32 bit system is becoming a thing of the past. Does that sound about right to you. It's just hard for me to get rid of this laptop right now as there is nothing wrong with it other than it could be a tad faster.
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I think I just saw something in your reply that made a lot of sense to me. "bad memory management and old styles of allocating resources that were not designed to operate at the edge of the maximum address space." Those are your words and they make more sense now that I have the graphic.

 

Ok if you want to go a bit more technical.

If the bios is clever enough it can remap its resources, some of that reserved space and can hide it from the OS in a way and put it "above" that 4GB of space so that in actuality it uses the ram the OS can't (if you see what I mean) and simply reserves space better calculated for what it needs rather than a large amount just to be easy and safe.

There is nothing you can do about GFX memory etc having to take part of that 4GB space. Even if you had a dedicated card with 1GB of graphics memory it HAS to be effectivly in that 4GB window since it is directly seen and used by the OS.

The bios in your case is being very inefficient.

 

Anything to be done about that or is that just the way it's going to be like it or not? When you say the BIOS is being very inefficient, I understand that, but is it because of the model of laptop or the BIOS hasn't been updated or should it just be left well enough alone because like I said, It's just the way it's gonna be.

 

Its just going to be that way unless you move to a 64bit OS, in which case all of your 4GB (unless your graphics is eating any) will be available.

 

Some people seem to think Windows 32 bit can use between 3-3.6 but all of the above information is right Vista can only utilise the 3gb mark and the rest is used for your integrated GPU etc.

I was running 4gb on Vista 32 for a while and it showed 4GB memory being addressed but not used. The best way is to goto Start: in the run section type dxdiag.exe and it will tell you exactly how much your system is using. I installed windows 7 32 bit which only addressed 2.98gb but then recently upgraded to 64 bit which runs the full 4GB.

All the fuss over 64 bit is highly overrated I was a bit worried bout it but windows 7 64 is the best operating system ive used, clearly faster and my Windows experience rating has increased by 0.5-0.75 on most ratings. All the programs and games I have run work as well.