[Gllug] How much system memory do I have?

[John Winters]

ryan-ir at hai.fi wrote:
> Good Day all.
> 
> Last Monday I thought that I would go down to Tottenham Court Road and
> buy myself a laptop. I got something but yesterday I started to wonder
> about how much RAM this computer actually has - it says 4GBs on the box.

[snip report of different OSs seeing different amounts of RAM]

There are two different questions here:

1) How much RAM does my computer have?

   Pretty certainly 4 Gigs

2) How much RAM can my OS address?

   If you're running a 32-bit operating system then you will find that
the OS is restricted to anywhere between 3 and 3.5 Gigs.  Arguably when
the OS is reporting how much RAM there is it should perhaps say "4 Gigs
but I can use only 3" rather than just saying "3 Gigs".

You don't say what processor the laptop has, but given its age and the
fact that it has 4G of RAM installed I would expect it to be 64 bit
capable.  Install the 64 bit version of Ubuntu and you will find you can
use all your RAM.

HTH
John
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