From: Hakan Koseoglu hakan@koseoglu.org
In the past, I heard that these 700MB were normally reserved for bios or
chipset It still is, even with with 64 bit. If your motherboard supports remapping this memory with 64 bit you can use the whole 4GB. Otherwise you're limited to 3.2:
hakan@photon:~$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3262 1972 1290 0 103 737 -/+ buffers/cache: 1131 2131 Swap: 7812 308 7504 hakan@photon:~$ arch x86_64
Thx for all the answers. As a matter of fact, while my Dell Vostro 410 was getting 3.3GB without PAE, a new Vostro 430 was getting only 3GB (but a full 4GB in PAE)... I went anyway for the non PAE just for peace of mind and because 3GB is still plenty.
Thx, JD