Vista RAM Question

Recently I upgraded the RAM on my bigger Toshiba laptop to a blistering 4 Gigs from the stock 2 Gigs. Everything runs great, and surprisingly, even my dial up seems faster D: But theres something I gotta know. In both PC Wizard and in the BIOS, it says the memory controller can only handle 3 Gigs of RAM, but in the properties of the laptop, it still shows the 4 Gigs (PC Wizard shows 4, BIOS shows 3). So the question is, would it be fine to just leave the extra Gig in, or should I put back one of the 1 Gig sticks?

Thanks a-@

The last gig does certainly not change the efficiency, so if you've already bought it, why not keep it there? (Unless you need it somewhere else) Eventually, if you're not using a lot of 32-bit programs, you could upgrade to x64.

so, it wont hurt to take it out later? @-a cause if the laptop im buying my mom for her bday uses the same ram, i was gonna put the extra there and drop an old 1 gig back in.

if you have 4 sodimm slots in your laptop and you take out one, it might kick the ram set up out of dual channel mode...thus decreasing performance.

I thought laptops commonly have 2 sodimm slots :S

Switch to 64 bit to take advantage. But you might as well leave it. I've heard some programs take advantage of that extra RAM even if windows only recognizes 3 (in 32 bit). And most 32 bit programs I've used in 64 Bit Vista have all worked without errors if not faster. Plus 64 bit processing won't kill you.