Submission + - Notebooks moving to 4 GB standard.
akintayo writes: Digitimes reports that first-tier notebook manufactures are increasing the standard installed memory from the current 1 GB standard to 4GB. They claim the move is an attempt to shore up the costs of DRAM chips, which are currently depressed because of a glut in market. The glut is supposedly due to increased manufacturing capacity and the slow adoption of Microsoft's Vista operating system.
The proposed move is interesting given that 32-bit Vista and XP cannot access 4 GB of memory, rather they have a practical 3.1 — 3.3 GB limit. The difference is due to the fact that the address range being used for memory-mapped I/O is within the 32-bit address space, and apparent driver problems using address remapping. With Vista SP1 it seems that Microsoft has decided to fix the problem by reporting the installed memory rather than the available memory.
