Windows 10 - low usable RAM in Windows

G

GerdP

Bit poster
Hi, I have two issues with Parallels Desktop and Windows 10 as a guest VM which I believe are related. I have an iMac pro with 32GB RAM. I dedicated 12GB to the Windows 10 guest - however, Windows System Info tells me that 12GB of memory is dedicated but only 2,75GB is usable. This has impact on applications which need e.g. more than 4GB. What could be the reason that Windows can only use 2,75GB? I stopped nearly all applications on my iMac Pro so that MacOS doesn't use too much memory. What could be the reason that the Windows guest doesn't have more than 2,75GB usable although 12GB RAM is dedicated? Is there an option to reserve the 12GB for Windows so that macOS has only the rest of 32GB-12GB=20GB available which should be plenty?

The second issue is that Windows starts extremely often so that text, fields, and descriptions are partly or completely not visible. That is really annoying. Sometime you can move with the mouse over text fields and the text shows up but disappear very quickly. If I search for the issue in the internet, I only find the problem a couple of years ago. However, nothing about it in the recent time. Not sure if I'm the only one who has that problem. Sometimes I have to restart windows several times before Windows works correctly, especially after updates.

I could imagine that the second issue is occurring because Windows doesn't have enough RAM.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Gerd
 
Are you running Win10 32bit or Win10 64bit?.
2.75GB usable is what you will see with a Win32 installation. Remember this still has the 4GB total memory limitation, and once the memory for the virtual BIOS, video card, etc., are removed, you will get 2.75GB usable. Install Win10 64, and instead you will see about 95% of the RAM you allocate.
So my Win10 64 install shows about 7.5GB Gb usable with 8GB allocated.
 
yes, great, that was it. I thought I had a Windows 10 64bit system but after checking it was only a 32bit system. Thank you, RogerH6. I wonder if the second issue will show up in the 64bit system. New installation of the system 64bit is already done easily but I have to look for all the software I installed on the old 32bit system.....

Thanks Gerd
 
The 2.75, was a 'familiar' number, so I thought this might be the case...
Win10 generally runs most 32bit applications OK. The only issue normally with older apps, is if they use the the really old install.
It is possible to actually run a really old app, by using WineVDM.
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There are other programs that do the same thing. This runs a basic emulation shell, that can execute really old Windows programs. :)
This does have issues, when you try to install a program that insists on writing it's install files into a location that Win10 has protection on, so a few 'caveats', but it is surprising what you can run!...
 
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