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I recently picked up a Dell Optiplex 210L with 1 GB of RAM. I did a clean install of Win7 64-bit and then I upgraded it to it's max of 4 GB of RAM. The BIOS reports 4 GB. Windows reports 4 GB total, but only 2.72 GB available. Resource Monitor reports 4 GB total, but shows 1290 MB reserved for "hardware". The machine has an onboard video card, but it only has 8 MB allocated to it and I've installed an add-in video card with it's own onboard 256 MB of RAM, so it shouldn't even be using that. The BIOS firmware update is current, at version A02.
Additional Info: Chipset is Intel i915P/i915G which supports up to 8 GB of RAM. DIMMs are 2 GB each... only 2 memory slots, so this really the only configuration you can get 4 GB in...
Question is: How can I release this other 1290 MB of ram for use in Windows, or baring that, at least can someone provide an explanation for why the hardware seems to need that much additional RAM when it was apparently delivered from Dell configured for only 1 GB and worked fine?
Scott Mayfield
Posted 2016-08-07T16:12:00.587
Reputation: 203
1http://superuser.com/questions/56157/why-is-all-my-extra-ram-marked-as-hardware-reserved-in-windows-7?rq=1 – Moab – 2016-08-07T16:19:12.010
Tnx, I saw that question/answer but it's not relevant to this machine or this memory configuration. – Scott Mayfield – 2016-08-08T20:24:42.203