I have a Lenovo G50-45 laptop. It came with 6GB of ram, which I "upgraded" to 8GB. I don't know wtf is going on, but it has 4.5GB as "hardware reserved"....leaving me only 3.5GB of ram to use. Any ideas on how I can correct this? The laptop regularly has 1GB or less ram free and lags like hell until it's restarted.
I googled a bit and it seems to be a commonish issue, best I could find is that it's the video card has a shared memory configuration so it's taking some of that memory. That or you're using 32 bit windows.
Sounds like your video card or cards might be reserving alot of ram. Maybe you have some preinstalled ramdrive. Is it upgraded so that you have 2 x 4gb or what configuration is it ? Depending on which g50-45 you have, most of that model line that i have seen has cards that use shared memory. Perhaps you can change how much ram it uses in bios.
I searched and couldnt find anything on your model regarding how to change the reserved amount, not even in the manual. download.lenovo.com/consumer/mobiles_pub/lenovo_g_z_50_series_hmm.pdf
there is maybe a new BIOS version for this model? Also,i would check this msconfig =>Start => advanced options and check the amount of ram selected at start and play with checking or not that and see if anything changes. Also,boot from a live Linux,install htop and see what is using your ram
Thinking about just "upgrading" it to 16GB and seeing what happens. Windows reports 8GB of ram installed, 4.5GB as "hardware reserved" and 3.5GB as being available to the OS. I'll have to play with it some more tomorrow. It's my work laptop and stays there at night. There is no ramdrive that I'm aware of. Yes, it's 2x4GB. It was originally 6GB in a 4+2 configuration. 4.5GB is quite a lot of memory for an iGP....