Honestly, I never noticed it till date, and I was really surprised when I was working with a few Virtual Machines today on my Win 7 Laptop which has 4GB RAM. I was thinking that something must have gone wrong with my laptop. Finally, I did some research and found a few interesting things. First of all, there were a lot of people in forums who were thinking that there is something wrong with their machines, and they have gone to the extent of changing their BIOS settings, plugging out the RAM, etc.

Don’t believe me? Okay, let me show you a few snapshots to clarify...

On my Win 2k3 machine, my System Properties (Right click on My Computer and select properties) looks as follows...

...and the Task Manager’s Performance Tab shows the Memory as follows...

So far so good. That’s what you would expect, right?

Let’s check the output on my Win 7 machine. Oh by the way, just as an FYI... the Win 2k3 machine is running as a Virtual Machine on my Win 7 machine.

System Properties shows the RAM as 4 GB...

 

...and now the BIG SURPRISE... the Task Manager’s Performance tab...

 

Crap!! Where is my 1 GB? Who stole that??? That’s the question I believe a lot of people are asking with Win 7. It seems like the same issue is present with Vista as well (I am not sure though). But, I just checked my Windows Server 2008 enterprise, and the output is correct (similar to Win 2k3). Let’s first find out where exactly this 1 GB is! Click on Resource Monitor on the screen and switch to Memory tab.

1027 + 3069 = 4096!!! So that makes sense, and I have just given you an answer.

Unfortunately, I have got quite a few questions which I don’t know the answer yet... and I can feel the pain already. I have to run 3 VM at the same time with just 1 GB each. This was possible easily with Win 2k3, but now it is not possible with the same hardware

Why such a difference from other versions of Windows? 
Is there a way to tweak this?
Any side effects of even trying to tweak this (I don’t want any blue screens!)?
And above all, am I missing anything or reading something wrong??

I don’t have any answers to these questions. Do you? Please comment, and let me know if you are seeing the same problem or if you have a solution to this.

Thanks,
Rahul

 

Quote of the day:
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say. - Marshall McLuhan