Acer Extensa does not recognize memory that came with it properly
I have an Acer Extena 5630z that came with 4 GB memory (2 times 2 GB modules) from the factory. However, the BIOS reports only 3 GB in any OS I try be it 64 or 32 bit. Why is this? The BIOS is version 1.19 and there are newer ones. Should I consider an update? Is this a memory remappin issue
This processor and chipset should support 36 bit address space in a 32 bit OS even.
Answers
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You can try to update your BIOS but i don't think it will fix this.
does your extensa have shared video card memory?
if so, a part of your ram is used as VGA ram.
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the video card is unlikely to be the reason since the BIOS states that it uses 64-256 MB dynamically, yet in this case 1GB is gone. Also the BIOS indicates that all the address space from 3-4 GB is reserved, so I'm betting the problem is that the product is simply poorly designed in the sense that even as the hardware supports that amount of memory the firmware does not appear to be able to do so. However, as far as I can see, neither the producer of the BIOS or Acer provide any information on how this issue could be resolved or even any information on what the new versions of the BIOS do. There have been at least two new BIOS publications 1.2 and 1.3 and since the publishing dates are after PAE-kernels became common, it could be possible that they now support PAE. But, this is guessing and updating BIOS on the basis of some hunch is not worth the risk maybe??
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maybe I should avoid acer in the future...
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You can try to update the bios, i don't think you will kill your notebook.I'm not an Acer employee.0
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Yes, that is true.The fact that there are no release notes or support pages that tell about the differences in the various versions of the BIOS is also quite unprofessional.
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I want reword my last post and just say that it seems quite odd to me that the Extensa harware seems to be specifically designed to support 4 GB, whereas the BIOS does not seem to allow that. But AFAIK this does indeed seem to be the case here.
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