Windows XP install made an extra partition, and shows 3.25gb RAM of 4gb

Well, my HDD is 250GB, and Windows XP split it into 2 partitions during installation, is there a way to combine the 2 into one?

And also, my 4GB of RAM is showing as 3.25GB, any ideas?

 

Not sure why windows, as you say, split it into 2 partitions during install. Could it be possible that the size of the area of the disk that you were formatting as ntfs at the start of windows setup was smaller than the total size of the disk? Say if a hard disk is 500mb, it should default to format the system partition (the partition you are installing windows to) using the whole disk, ie 500mb, but I have seen it before where for some reason it defaults to less than the whole disk and you have to manually go into the field and set it to the maximum. But if that was the case it probably wouldn't have created a second partition automatically, are you saying that you have a second partiton with a drive letter now? How big are the partitions? You could try to use partition magic to merge them together into one partition of the whole size of the disk, it claims it can do this and many people use it but it can also create problems so if you have important data on the disk use at your own risk. When you go into disk management (right click my computer > manage > disk management) what does it say about your disk and partitions?

As for your issue with the 3.25GB of ram, that is the maximum amount of ram that can be used with a 32bit operating system. There is no way you will see the full 4GB unless you upgrade to the 64bit version of xp or vista. In that case I would recommend vista since there is way more driver support etc than the 64bit version of xp for when you run into problems.

 

104GB unallocated.

 

Go back into disk managment, right click on that unallocted space and "create new partition" (or something similar). During the options make sure that you use all the available space for that partition (somewhere around 106496 MB in your case), you can check the box to do a quick format to speed things up and make sure you give it a drive letter.

Then bobs your fathers brother, you got the rest of your disk space back. There are actually advantages to partitioning your disks anyway, such as files not getting as fragmented as they would have over a bigger partition.