Problem With System Reserved Memory

[PoBidauBen]

My Dell Latitude 7480 has 16 GBs of RAM installed. However, only 4.8 GBs of RAM is "usable" and the other 11.2 GBs are "Hardware Reserved." I have made changes (through msconfig, regedit), checked the bios, and physically taken out and put the RAM sticks back in. I'm lost, could you help?

[Zero_Hour]

Have you checked to see if its being allocated as virtual memory?

 

Go to file explorer

Left click on this pc and go to properties

Under the about page scroll down and select advanced system properties

Select advanced

Select performance settings and then advanced again, you should see virtual mem allocation.

 

 

 

Edited October 28, 2022 by lopj245
Missed the part where you tried ms config.

[PoBidauBen]

when I tried it would change my "committed RAM" but not the hardware reserved RAM

[The Hope]

People often have very high RAM usage on Windows. Most persons immediately think that there is a hardware problem. But often it is a software problem.

You can always use a Unix-like system and see what the RAM usage is.

 

I personally use FreeBSD and this is my desktop RAM use for a system I have been using for over 3 years without reinstallation. Around 117 MB of active RAM usage and the rest is mainly cache or free RAM.

 

[heimdali]

@The Hope Which people are you referring to?  I'm using Linux and run of memory when I have only 32GB RAM because sometimes the software running needs more than that.  And I keep wondering why people on this forum still seriously consider getting only 16GB for their computers.  If they were frequently running out of memory, they probably wouldn't do that.

 

FreeBSD is memory friendly.  Unfortunately it appears to be more of an obstacle than useful in regards to desktop use, and its NFS implementation is so bad I can't use it for a server.

 

@PoBidauBen Anyway, I've seen this problem with memory being unavailable with, IIRC, Lenovo desktops (old Think Stations, IIRC) and never found out what the problem was because it turned out not to be relevant and I never tried to find out.  Linux and FreeBSD run just fine on those.  It could be a bug in Windows.  I hope you can figure it out since I might see it again and then it would be good to know how to solve it.

 

[Hairless Monkey]

When people have this problem on desktop computers, they are often able to solve the issue by changing the memory configuration. So here is what I would do if I were you.

 

1. Remove one stick of RAM.
2. Boot into Windows. Check what it says for hardware reserved.
3. Shut the system down, and reinstall the stick you removed.
4. Boot back into Windows and check that hardware reserved number again.

I understand this will likely be more complicated with a laptop, but hopefully it will help you as it has helped those with desktops.

[heimdali]

What if it's still reserved?

 

[The Hope]

On 11/3/2022 at 7:43 PM, heimdali said:

Unfortunately it appears to be more of an obstacle than useful in regards to desktop use, and its NFS implementation is so bad I can't use it for a server.

 

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/performance-of-linux-vs-freebsd-nfs-clients.14072/

If I just dd a large file to and from the NFS mounted zpool, I see almost identical performance.

If I do an operation with many files, I see dramatically better performance from the FreeBSD server. 

 

My Microsoft LifeCam HD 3000 works perfectly on FreeBSD, but windows10 no longer supports it. This is a Microsoft webcam. Windows10 desktop suitability has more gaps in all basic areas in my experience.

 

I've been monitoring my RAM usage a bit further on FreeBSD and seen that the active usage sometimes goes below 40MB in some situations when I'm using the PC for a while:

 

[heimdali]

Try to export some directories residing on a file system to different NFS clients with FreeBSD and you'll see what I mean.

 

What about wayland?

 

PS: It still says in the handbook (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/network-servers/#network-configuring-nfs)

 

"The file systems which the NFS server will share are specified in /etc/exports. Each line in this file specifies a file system to be exported, which clients have access to that file system"

 

Read that *very* carefully.  I only understood it after I found out the hard way that NFS is totally useless on FreeBSD.

 

Other than that, FreeBSD is really cute and delightful because it's very much like Linux used to be 25 years ago.  But why use it?  NFS is a no-go, and last time I checked, virtualisation was in a rudimentary state.  Using FreeBSD would require more learning, and there isn't anything I couldn't do as well or better with Linux without the additional learning.  I don't mind the learning, but I don't want to run into a situation in which something needs to be fixed and FreeBSD gets in the way because of it.

 

[Mark Kaine]

honestly i usually dont like pages like this but this seems to be a pretty good guide

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/hardware-reserved-memory-windows-10.html%3famp

 

especially the max memory seems worth checking as well as perhaps memory for iGPU...

 

On 11/3/2022 at 8:00 PM, Hairless Monkey Boy said:

When people have this problem on desktop computers, they are often able to solve the issue by changing the memory configuration. So here is what I would do if I were you.

 

1. Remove one stick of RAM.
2. Boot into Windows. Check what it says for hardware reserved.
3. Shut the system down, and reinstall the stick you removed.
4. Boot back into Windows and check that hardware reserved number again.

I understand this will likely be more complicated with a laptop, but hopefully it will help you as it has helped those with desktops.

yeah, good post... also worth trying... although I seem to remember some laptops have the RAM soldered on lol...