[ltp] The mystery of missing RAM

[James Knott]

David A. Desrosiers wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 21:19 -0700, Bernard Tremblay wrote:
>> Did you check in the BIOS setup if your hole 4Gb was seen.  It should
>> be totally seen by the BIOS. May be there is other stuff that sit on
>> your motherboard (sound card, network card, modem, IBM stuff ?...)
>> and this use some memory from the main board.
> 
> I'm skeptical. Why would a modem use physical system RAM? Why would a
> sound card use physical system RAM? 

They don't use physical RAM, they use memory address space.  To prevent 
conflict, the physical memory is disabled in that range.
> 
> More-importantly, why did this design change? 

Aug 1981.  That goes back to the days of the original PC where of the 1 
MB address range, only 640K was available for RAM.  Other systems did 
similar.

> 
> MY T42p has none of these problems, and sees the full 4GB of RAM, runs a
> 32-bit OS, and has an integrated graphics adapter. 
> 
> Now that I've "upgraded" to an Intel Core 2 Duo, discrete (external)
> graphics, etc. I lose 25% of my physical RAM. I may sell these two
> laptops and go back to my T42p if I can't solve this.
> 
> 


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