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Why is all my extra RAM marked as “hardware reserved” in Windows 7?
I have a brand new motherboard with 16GB DDR3 RAM, a 6 core CPU, and Windows 7 64-bit says I've got 7.96 GB free, and 8192 MB reserved for hardware use.
I find that a little hard to understand, as my HD5950 video card has 2 GB of DDR5 memory, and I tried all the above remedies to find that even though my memory is on the QVL for 4 X 4 GB of RAM, and my CPU is also on the QVL, BOTH the BIOS and Windows 7 report 16GB, but NOT available to use.
How can a hardware resource tie up 8 GB of memory?
I know that Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium is limited to 16GB, but 8GB reserved?
When I had 8GB of memory, hardware reserved was only 2 GB. By logical extension then, more memory means more reserved memory for the hardware, which didn't change?
Microsoft says it is a hardware problem, my motherboard manufacturer says it's a problem with the OS. One tech even suggested removing half my memory so I'll have more free percentage of memory available. I thought that since the hardware supported 32 GB of memory, and the OS supports only 16 GB of memory that I would reap the best benefits from the lesser memory configuration.
