Is it possible to have TOO MUCH RAM?
You know the saying, “You can’t have too much RAM or too much storage.”
Well, there is at least one case where a lot of RAM can cause problems.
My current desktop had 1 Gig of RAM and I recently bought an additional 2 Gigs since the price was so low. (And of course I used The AdmiN’s link to give a little back to AtA)
Wow, 3 Gigs of RAM what could possibly be bad about that? Well one night, I went to put the system into hibernate and it beeped and a balloon popped up from the system tray that said “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API.” After that, the system would only go into standby, not into hibernate. In fact the hibernate tab of the Power Options settings was completely gone.
It turns out this is a known issue and Microsoft has a patch for it. The KB article describes the exact problem I was having and states “This problem typically occurs when the computer uses 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM.“
My favorite part of the article is
“This problem occurs because the Windows kernel power manager cannot obtain the memory resources that are required to prepare the computer to hibernate.“
So basically, you have so much memory that we cannot obtain enough memory! The system had no problem obtaining enough memory resources when there was only 1 Gig of RAM, but with 3 Gigs there isn’t enough.
I applied the patch offered in the article and haven’t had any problem putting the system into hibernate since.
Who knew, it IS possible to have too much RAM!
April 9, 2008 - 3:52 am
Haha! The fun you can have with M$. Too little or too much is also a problem!
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April 9, 2008 - 6:21 am
whoa whoa whoa!!
You mean to tell me that people actually USE the hibernate function!?!?
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April 9, 2008 - 6:29 am
Why wouldn't you want a battery saving mode that saves your session to disk and starts up a lot faster to the point you were working at?
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April 9, 2008 - 7:29 am
Yes and why not? It uses far less energy than leaving the machine on all night or even sleep and saves lots of time during startup and shutdown. Hibernate uses just a little more energy than turning the machine off and I can get it back from hibernate to a usable desktop in about 30 seconds. The only reason not to use it is if you're going to power the machine off.
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April 9, 2008 - 8:13 am
Great article! Peter!
I loved the part where you bought your ram from our affiliate link! ;)
And FYI: I almost always hibernate instead of shutting down even for the night when I am plugged in. Who knows when you need that almost instant on…
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April 10, 2008 - 5:33 pm
At least there is a patch :). The problem is that hibernate (afaik) copies RAM contents to C drive. Too much Ram requires lots of free space on C.
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April 11, 2008 - 2:21 pm
Yes it does. It also increases the size of the page file. So adding the 2 Gigs of RAM used up an additional 4 Gigs of disk space. But disk space is even cheaper than RAM so it's not a real big deal.
Unless you're running a triple boot system with a separate data partition (like I am) and ended up needed to repartition the whole system to make room for the larger files. It's always something….
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April 12, 2008 - 3:56 pm
A bit off topic and probably useless… but I found that the command "powercfg /hibernate off" can be used to turn off hibernate and free up the HDD space. "powercfg /hibernate on" will turn it back on. No restart required.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
August 19th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Neat trick for recovering some quick hard drive space Cicom3nd3z! Thanks
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January 6, 2009 - 5:26 am
I’m after upgrading my HP DV2699ea laptop from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. The spec says that it’s max is 2GB (1GB per slot), but according to my chipset I should be able to have more:
Intel 945GM Express with a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T7500 2.20 GHz, Level 2 cache 4 MB.
Shouldn’t I be able to support 2GB per slot?
When I contacted HP about it they said if I put in 4GB then the laptop ‘ may emit beeps or no display so we recommed using 2 GB memory module only’. But then 2 minutes later another representative emailed and said I could install it but 32bit MS OS would only show it as 3GB.
I’m a bit confused….can I install more RAM or not??????
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 6:01 am
32bit OS’s normally can only support 2gb. 64bit os’s can support a lot more. Read this for more information Rory:
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2004/02/19/the-4gb-windows-memory-limit-what-does-it-really-mean.aspx
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January 6, 2009 - 6:06 am
Thanks for the reply….So is it not the hardware that would be limiting me to 2GB it’s the OS? But if that was the case why are other similar aged and specced laptops etc running 4gb ram. I’ve read many threads saying you’d see at least 3GB on on 32bit OS’s.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Out of the box my vista 32 bit os has 4gb of physical memory, It shows 3454mb installed. This is due to the OS there are certain hacks and workarounds to allow the OS to let you use your 4gb but I find that they can be flaky and not stable especially in a production machine.
a fairly obvious hint why this is happening: 32-bit Operating System. In any 32-bit operating system, the virtual address space is limited, by definition, to the size of a 32-bit value:
232 = 4,294,967,296
4,294,967,296 / (1,024 x 1,024) = 4,096
As far as 32-bit Vista is concerned, the world ends at 4,096 megabytes. That’s it. That’s all there is. No más.
Addressing more than 4 GB of memory is possible in a 32-bit operating system, but it takes nasty hardware hacks like 36-bit PAE extensions in the CPU, together with nasty software hacks like the AWE API.
Unless the application is specifically coded to be take advantage of these hacks, it’s confined to 4 GB. Well, actually, it’s stuck with even less– 2 GB or 3 GB of virtual address space, at least on Windows.
OK, so we’re limited to 4,096 megabytes of virtual address space on a 32-bit operating system. Could be worse.* We could be back in 16-bit land, where the world ended at 64 kilobytes. Brr. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about segments, and pointers of the near and far variety. Let us never speak of this again.
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January 6, 2009 - 9:32 am
Hi Karl,
I appreciate the info but all I need to know is whether my HP dv2699ea with it’s Intel 945GM Express chipset will take 4GB of RAM. Do you know whether this is possible, I’m not fussed if it shows up 3.5GB etc, just as long as I can get above the original 2GB’s I’ve already got?
Thanks,
Rory
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Yes it should show up to 3.45gb. But there is also a small possibility it will not boot and you will get bios beeps. This depends on the bios version.
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NinjaAdmin Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 10:01 am
I m runnin a dv2699ea with 4gb installed and it shows 3.54gb! I also bought ALL my memory via this link that gives a small percentage to AskTheAdmin.com!
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/4s121shqnhp47BA67564A58875B
Did you do the same? I love to give back to the Admin – he has helped me so much over the last few years.
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Matt Reply:
April 14th, 2009 at 12:59 am
Well thats all the confirmation i need, thanks alot.
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January 6, 2009 - 10:18 am
Great…one last question. Can the, potential, problem be overcome by updating the bios?
Again thank you for your help….I will use the link and buy from crucial.
Rory :)
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