Look at this glorious screenshot taken from the system information of my desktop PC:

You see that? All 4GB of my RAM are finally recognized by Windows 7! No more “4GB (3GB usable)”! I just now installed the 64-bit version because I’ve been having a slew of troubles with The Sims 3 in Windows 7 32-bit, plus I wanted to go to 64-bit anyway, so I figured I’d take the leap. Even with 64-bit, I had 3GB of usable RAM because some was marked as “hardware reserved.” After a bit of Googling, I found I should check my BIOS settings for something like the following: frame buffer size, video buffer size, or memory remapping. I found the latter but there were two options: h/w remapping and s/w remapping. More Googling and forum-checking led me to enable s/w remapping and leave h/w remapping disabled. Boot into Windows, and I see the above information–huzzah!

I still have EA Download Manager installing The Sims 3, so it’ll be a while yet before I know if this has fixed my oh-so-annoying crashes. I would be playing along, doing fine, when suddenly my screen would go black and audio would be caught in a loop. My monitor light would go orange and there would no longer be a signal to the monitor. The only way to fix it was to hold in the reset button. This seemed to most often happen when I was scrolling across the map. It happened less frequently when I ran in windowed mode and killed all processes I thought I didn’t need. It was getting to the point where I saved every 5 minutes because it was so frequent, and so annoying to lose all that unsaved progress.