Well My new system has 4gb or ram but for some reason Vista only sees 3.5gb. I have been told that since my video card has 640mb of ram that windows removes that much from your systems total ram but thats not true. I removed 2 gb of ram and windows now shows 2 gb of ram even with my 640mb video card.

Long story short dont waste you money with 4gb of ram cause 2 gb works just fine.

with ultimate, it should kick the remaining half gig or so to video. and the only versions that will use more than 3.5 is the 64 bit versions. i try and tell that to customers all the time but they don't listen.

Okay I get it now cause I do have Vista Ultimate installed so what you say makes sense of it. Thank you

no problem

Vista (and Xp I beleive) can only address 4GB TOTAL of memory, and so it has no choice but to "Not see" your ram in favor of being able to address the other cards in your system; like your video card.

3.24 gigs is all 32 bit windows xp and vista can use no more. we have a test bench where we keep all our memory and processors and we loaded it up with 8 gigs and all it used was 3.24

Well I dont know how much is being used by vista but when I look at computer info it says 3.50 for ram.

Yea, the actual amount left for ram is dependant on what the motherboard has integrated and whats been added in. Anywhere from 3 to 3.7 is typical.