Hardware Reserved Memory- How to Fix this

Yesterday, When I opened Task Manger in Windows 10 to close a program, I went through the Performance tab and noticed a very strange thing. The sum of the In useand Available memory was not equal to my total physical memory(RAM). I have 8 GB of RAM installed on my system out of which 2.9 Gigs was being in use but only 3.6 gigs of RAM was available. Where the rest of 1.5 GB RAM gone? Taking a closed look at the numbers, I figured out that 1.5 GB of memory is hardware reserved. One and half gigs of RAM is a lot of memory, that is almost 20% of total memory and it was not available for use.   I am still confused about the hardware reserved memory concept, but it is not available to user and OS and hence it is complete waste of RAM. The hardware reserved memory problem looks complicated but its solution is very simple. Follow these simple steps to fix hardware reserved memory problem.

Fix Hardware Reserved Memory problem

• Here is the screenshot of my Performance tab in the task manger. As you can see 1.5 GB of memory is reserved for Hardware which leaves total physical memory of only 6.5 GB.

• Press Window Key + R to open the run dialog box. Type msconfig and click OK. This will open the System Configuration window.

• Navigate to Boot tab and click on Advanced options.

• Uncheck the Maximum memory checkbox. Also uncheck the Number of processorsbox, if it is checked. Click OK. Then click Apply and OK. The system will ask you for a restart to apply the changes. Restart the system or just Exit without restart to restart at some later point.

• After restart, Go to task manager and under performance tab check the hardware reserved memory. It should be anywhere between 50 MB to 150 MB, depending upon your PC configuration(mostly depend on Graphics memory).

The above solution is tested on Windows 10, but it should work fine for windows 7, 8 and 8.1 . Whether this worked for you or not, let me know in the comment section.

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