Windows 10: I have an old computer with 1GB being used by hardware

Greetings guys.

I have some parent which have a 2007 PC with Win10, with a processor AMD 2.11 GHZ Dual Core with 4GB RAM DDR2. I was just looking task manager and it says just have 3GB, 1GB reserved for hardwware (haven't done any previous tweak to RAM by the way). Is there some way to use all 4GB instead of 3GB? Unfortunately isn't as simple as switching motherboard or adding more RAM, because the technology used is really OLD with AM2 and DDR2 RAM. This could help a little bit better in performance. Thanks as always for any of your advices.
Thanks.

EDIT:
x86 system, 4GBs RAM.

:)

 

External DAC: Device Being Used By Another Application

Try ProcMon instead. That way you would be able to have a trace of where that output was generated and then go back in the trace to try to deduce what caused it. ProcMon is available from TechNet either separately or in the SysInternalsSuite. Another
utility from there that I am aware of but am not as familiar with might help on another tack by finding out what the specific point of contention is.

PS>.\handle.exe /?

Handle v3.51

Copyright (C) 1997-2013 Mark Russinovich

Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

usage: handle [[-a [-l]] [-u] | [-c <handle> [-y]] | [-s]] [-p <process>|<pid>] [name]

-a Dump all handle information.

-l Just show pagefile-backed section handles.

-c Closes the specified handle (interpreted as a hexadecimal number).

You must specify the process by its PID.

WARNING: Closing handles can cause application or system instability.

-y Don't prompt for close handle confirmation.

-s Print count of each type of handle open.

-u Show the owning user name when searching for handles.

-p Dump handles belonging to process (partial name accepted).

name Search for handles to objects with <name> (fragment accepted).

No arguments will dump all file references.



Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle

---

 

External DAC: Device Being Used By Another Application

I'll move on to work with sys info on windows. I may be able to spot conflicts or other oddities there.

 

32 or 64 Windows 10? If it is x86 and not x64 you will not be able to use the full 4GB or ram.

 

My bad good sir. x86 system, 4GBs DDR2 667MHz.

 

Part of it is used by the system for various, graphics for one, so most x86 machines report same as yours 3GB. Look in the Resource Monitor under Computer Management, Memory, Performance. You can see how there is reserved memory and standby memory.

 

A 32-bit system has a maximum 4GB address space. This has to accommodate all addressable memory, including the video RAM (if used). Look at Memory in Task Manager on the Performance tab. Near the bottom it says 'Hardware reserved:' followed by an amount of memory. This will be the address space being used for you video memory, the rest is available for addressing your installed RAM.

The only way to access all 4GB of the installed RAM would be to go for 64-bit Windows 10. Unfortunately you cannot upgrade a 32-bit system to 64-bits, it would have to be a clean install.

 

Makes sense. But in that way doing a newer clean installation wouldn't be counter productive in the same time? I mean from what I know, 4gb would be too low RAM for a x64 system considering too just have 677mhz modules for each one of them. Would be that worth to get the extra +1GB being used right now considering 64 bits OS requires +1GB RAM as requirement too?

 

Minimum requirements are surprisingly modest.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...specifications

My main system is running x64 on 2.10GHz/4GB RAM with no problem, it is 1333MHz DDR3 though, which helps. In fact it will run quite happily with no swapfile, so memory as such isn't an issue. Maybe it would be for a heavy gamer, but for browsing and running Office apps 4GB is more than sufficient in my experience.

On the whole though, I'd stick a 32-bit system for this particular PC, particularly with its slower memory.

Physical RAM should not be an issue, you don't really need to worry about your 'unaddressable' 1GB. My x86 test machine (System Two in the specs below) ran on just 1GB until very recently. Now been upgraded to 4GB, but it has only 2.9GB useable RAM. Before the upgrade it would issue 'memory low' warnings when I tried to run without a swapfile, now it doesn't, even when running multiple Office apps.

NB: I'm not recommending running with no swapfile, it's just something I do for test purposes *Smile

 

BTW, An x64 system has a huge address space. It would be able to address all of the 4GB RAM, then use higher addresses for the video RAM. On my x64/4GB system the 'Hardware reserved' figure is just 52.1MB.

 

Unfortunately the computer have 2.11 GHz Dual core AM2, I have been testing it a couple of times however seems getting heavily bottlenecked (if that's the correct term) by no more than a single video on desktop or even a facebook video (which takes a delay of like 10 seconds if remembering correctly). So this is why I was wondering if could fix this 1GB hardware reserved, so would increase a little bit the performance. The problem with that very old technology is that if would ever be able to give a 2gb module instead of one with 1GB , then wouldn't change that much since that cheap motherboard (from that times) accepts no more than 833mhz if I remember correctly. Thanks for all your info by the way.

 

I don't think that the memory is the 'bottlekneck', rather the processor.

I'm not sure which one you have, but there are only a few AMDs it could be for an AM2 socket. I've chosen the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ for comparison. At 1040 its PassMark benchmarks are lower than either of my processors. The x64/4GB machine I use most (and have no 'speed' issues with) ranks at 1711. My x86/4GB test machine feels is a little sluggish, but useable at 1174. Comparisons here...

PassMark - CPU Performance Comparison

 

now that you mentioned, yeah that's the processor, x2 dual Core 4000+ ^^

 

Good guess *Biggrin

Yes, it will feel 'sluggish' then. I'm afraid the 'missing' 1GB is unlikely to help....

You need to give it less work to do. Try turning off all unnecessary background processes.

Turn On or Off Background Apps in Windows 10


and disable any unnecessary processes in Task Manager's Start-up tab.

 

Thanks for your cpu performance comparison! Yeah now that I saw it's dual core 4000+. Im glad that you can use it better than computer from my father. It feels really struggling with just loading a single video.
By the way, have you ever seen this little trick some people try to advice in order to improve RAM performance ?
How To Fix High Memory/RAM Usage In Windows 10 - YouTube

Is that really worth or doesn't that change anything overall?