First my system specs: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Intel i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07ghz (want the 980) 12Gigs of Patriot Sector7 RAM Sapphire Radeon HD5670 with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM (surprisingly excellent entry level card, but do plan on buying better to run in xfire mode) Asus Sabertooth X58 motherboard 2 - 500gig SATA II western digital caviar black drives in a 0 Raid (C drive) 2 - 1Terbyte SATA I western digital caviar black drives for archive/storage Gigabit ethernet and Realtek HD audio and Dual 21" widescreen monitors OK now on with explanations: I do a lot of video encoding of recorded HDTV shows I like (which I stream back over my internal network to watch on my xbox360), I've noticed that I can be downloading 3 or 4 gigabyte + files, watching a video stream in my second monitor, and doing various system maintenance things such as a defrag ALL while encoding and only use 4gigs of my 12 gigs loaded into the machine. My question is or maybe I'm looking more for suggestions: What can I do with the other 8 gigs that is seemingly doing nothing? Is there anything cool I can be doing with this extra RAM? BTW I should maybe mention Windows Media Player is streaming all my media over my network so don't need a virtual server setup to do that. If you have a good idea for me please post it with explanation of how to setup (can get technical if you want but others may read this and want to try some of your suggestions so keep explanations simple IF POSSIBLE). THANK YOU ALL IN ADVANCE!

From looking at the specs of your motherboard it should see all 12 gigs since its rated to support 24 gb of ram. You might need a bios upgrade for it to see it all.

From looking at the specs of your motherboard it should see all 12 gigs since its rated to support 24 gb of ram. You might need a bios upgrade for it to see it all. So your saying that windows 7 should automatically use it since its there..... I have seen it hit 4.07 but that is the highest its gone. Oh and I just updated it 2 days ago to the latest BIOS and drivers from ASUS. I thought I would need to add a line somewhere to force windows to use the available RAM like we used to have to do back in the day :P

What are you using to make the usage observations? Start->type resmon->select resource monitor from the programs results. select the memory tab The new hardware utilizes resources differently than previous generations, as you have discovered. You could run multiple virtualized computers with the hardware that you have. You have plenty of cores and memory to allocate to a virtual machine.

What are you using to make the usage observations? Start->type resmon->select resource monitor from the programs results. select the memory tab The new hardware utilizes resources differently than previous generations, as you have discovered. You could run multiple virtualized computers with the hardware that you have. You have plenty of cores and memory to allocate to a virtual machine. yeh I'm hoping someone will give me a cool idea for a virtual machine to run, since media player handles streaming my entire media collection so I don't need to create a server for that, I was hoping for an idea from another user on something cool to do with the extra memory :)

I found an answer as to why windows was only using 4gigs of memory out of my 12gigs from this link in hardware compatibility forum. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/b63620dd-352b-4d40-89b4-768ce846825c so now windows is showing it has the full 12 gigs available for usage. Although I may undo that and add a couple virtual servers infact I believe I have figured out something to do with a gig or 2 of it, something like setup my own intranet site and serve it up to the rest of the PC's on my network :)

I found an answer as to why windows was only using 4gigs of memory out of my 12gigs from this link in hardware compatibility forum from Alex Zhao. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/b63620dd-352b-4d40-89b4-768ce846825c so now windows is showing it has the full 12 gigs available for usage. Although I may undo that and add a couple virtual servers infact I believe I have figured out something to do with a gig or 2 of it, something like setup my own intranet site and serve it up to the rest of the PC's on my network :)