system read of ram installation

[inapert]

I just installed 4gb of ram in my computer and it only reads under system properties 2.99 gb of ram. Did I do something wrong or is this it?

[Broni]

http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=989

All 32-bit Operating Systems can only physically address 4 gigabytes of RAM, due to the math involved (2exp32 = 4,294,967,296).  Depending on your hardware, Vista may only see 3GB or 3.5GB of the total RAM installed, because there are some devices that are memory mapped.  The most common culpret of this type of device is a video card, which can use up to 512MB of memory for mapping.

You can tweak Vista's core to add another 4-bits of addressing capability, but you must have a 64-bit capable processor