4 GB of Physical Memory but 1.74 GB Usable on HP Pavilion DV6 x64bit

[deepeyes1000]

I do appreciate your opinion on this.  And you are right, I guess I'm lucky to have that option, but would you not say that this terrible flaw?  To not have any control over how much RAM my computer decides to take?  I mean I know for a fact that it can function and run perfectly fine on 262 MB of of reserved RAM.  Why should I be expected to accept the fact that the system suddenly needs to take half of the installed RAM when I place 4GB of RAM?

I guess I would also like to know maybe why there is no option for being able to enable memory mapping on laptops, but you can on desktops?  If I'm not mistaken, other companies allow their laptop users to have this function.   

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I'm just an end user like you, not a PC hardware engineer. 

I can also tell you that you can't remap memory on all desktops. I have a brand new HP 8200 Elite CMT desktop with 16 GB of memory, and it can't be remapped.

Also, no Intel based desktop/notebook supports memory remapping unless it has a 965 chipset or newer.

Notebooks are a different animal. They normally need have more hardware to operate than a desktop does. That takes more memory. Yours even has switchable graphics, so I imagine that eats up even more memory for the 2 graphics controllers. Did you take that into account?

It is up to the PC manufacturer to allow a memory remapping function in the BIOS. I cannot answer for HP as to why they don't.

So, when you look in the W7 Resource Monitor, the Hardware Reserved memory gray bar is over 2 GB?

I would have to think that if you installed 8 GB of memory, it couldn't eat up much more than that in the gray area.

Paul