System Cannot Identify 4G RAM

[Revenent]

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maximinus_thrax wrote:

So this is the kind of customer support we can expect from the company we decided to purchase from...great...this was the exact reason I avoided other companies.  

I'm still waiting to a Lenovo rep respond with their reasons for terrible support and cheap gimics to garner money from customers.  With all the responses this is getting someone's got to respond at some point.

Message Edited by maximinus_thrax on 02-02-2009 07:52 PM

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I don't understand why you're blaming Lenovo customer support for something they have no control over.

Anything over 3 GB has always been a mixed bag - and the more devices you have, the more likely you'll see less memory.

It's been documented publicly in many places, including on Microsoft's support site (e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929580).

So Lenovo can respond, but they'll just give you the same information.

To put things in perspective - you buy a normal sedan, say, a Honda Accord Inline-4.  You start filling up with 92 octane fuel.

And then you go complain to Honda, saying you don't see a massive performance boost.  What's Honda supposed to say?

I'd rather spend my energy fighting Lenovo support on bigger things - like a good way to get digital audio out of a W500 without resorting to some 3rd party add-on.

[Izmi]

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hoivan wrote:

Has anyone confirmed that upgrading to Vista64 or XP/64 will increase the available memory to the full 4GB to the o/s? I just want to make sure that this is indeed possible before I go thru this hassle.

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Hi hoivan,

A W500 user has informed me that on Vista 64, the full 4GB RAM are useable.

[maximinus_thrax]

You're right, that response is the kind of thing that can happen when one types while frustrated.

I'll find another way to deal with this problem.

[Johnwin]

I have the same problem on my W500 under Vista Ultimate SP1,
when I click about windows it showsonly 2.5 G physical memory
available, but I have installed 4 G ram on my computer.

Maybe it's the problem caused by Switchable Graphic driver,
the graphic card eat 1G share memory, it seems no way to change
the share meory, we do hope the new driver will fix this problem.

Message Edited by Johnwin on 02-07-2009 02:11 AM

Message Edited by Johnwin on 02-07-2009 02:11 AM

[lukaszsw]

I guess the pagefile size doesn't matter for this - I stand corrected but as I understand using the newest drivers mentioned by Mark Lenovo will get you your 0,5 GB RAM back (up to 3gb which seems to be max)

In my opinion if you want to work on this computer you would rather have more RAM and a video drive that actually supports opengl 2.1 fully than have switchable graphics right? In that case why would anybody not install the drivers from THIS LINK

Just a reminder because in my opinion it is an acceptable temporary solution which disables only one feature (switchable graphics) which hardly affects productivity on this machine

Message Edited by lukaszsw on 02-07-2009 02:43 AM

[Johnwin]

Thanks to Lukaszsw, I have downloaded the new driver from the link,
unstall the switchable graphic driver, change the bios to disable finding switchable graphic card,

install new driver, I got 2.6 G physical memory, 100 MB more than before.


Then I updated intel Turbo Memory driver, installed 5 vista updates from lenovo, fortunately,
I can see 3.1G physical memory on 'About Windows'.

But there is a new problem about the on screen display, I have to install the hotkey driver again,
choose onscreen display in the Display settings, change someing in the registry, it's working now.

[mbhockey13]

I see suggestions about the W500 and the switchable graphics, but my users are all running W700s with Windows XP Pro and the nVidia video with 1 GB of dedicated RAM. They all show 2.5 GB of RAM.

I have updated everything I can update, but I still don't get it. I know even with the 4GB of RAM they weren't going to show more than 3 GB, and the Dell Precisions they replaced all had 4 GB and showed 3 GB, but this is the first time I have seen 2.5 GB.

We have the ones with the Quad Core processors and RAID drives, too. With the 1 GB of video I expected better speed increases. I have to chalk some of it up to the missing .5 GB of RAM.

Any OTHER suggestions?

[Thinkpads4Life]

Where does Turbo Memory fit in? I got it as part of my W700 order. Does it really make booting up, application execution faster? How does it work?

Thanks!

[Voodoo]

I think it is an additional hard drive cache.  If you select SSD instead during the order process, the turbo boost becomes unavailable to add.  If you have HDDs then I think you will be glad to have it...

[Izmi]

I still see a regular stream of reports that people are irritated that their switchable graphics ThinkPads can only use 2.5 GB under Vista 32.

I cannot help but wonder why Lenovo is still not communicating this fact in a way that potential buyers are aware of it.

To quote myself: 

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Izmi wrote:

• There should be a note in online ordering system and in the sales literature.
• Lenovo should state whether this behavior is expected or not. Moreover, Lenovo should state whether they are going to improve the situation (by a BIOS/driver update).
• There should be a Lenovo "tip" document about it.

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