BIOS update fixes major 4GB RAM issue

[rkl]

The Vostro 400, until very recently, shipped with a BIOS that, somewhat incredibly, "lost" 771MB of usable physical RAM if you had 4GB of physical RAM installed. Dell kept very quiet about this issue for months, with the "smokescreen" of shipping 32-bit Windows (even though they don't state the OS bitness, which they really should!) that can only address 3.25GB RAM and also shipping 2GB RAM by default.

However, Dell do offer 4GB RAM pre-installed as an upgrade (they wanted 70 pounds for this upgrade from 2 to 4GB for the Vostro 400 I bought, but I declined and ordered it from Crucial for 30 pounds instead), so it was rather irresponsible of them to ship machines that couldn't "see" the full 4GB of RAM, even if you installed a 64-bit OS on them!

If you go to Drivers and Downloads on support.dell.com now, though, and type in your Service Tag, the BIOS section for both the Inspiron 530 (1.0.12) and Vostro 400 (1.0.13) both have a new release which does indeed fix this 4GB issue. A real shame it took them something like 4 months to finally sort it out though!

Now if only the fans were "silent" on the Vostro 400 (they're quiet, but I can hear them from a few feet away), then I'd say that the machine was virtually perfect now after the BIOS update.