Scammed? Billed for 2Gb extra RAM, XP sees only 1Gb extra

[Dork]

Some versions of the Intel Atom do indeed limit RAM. However their reasons for imposing the limit are marketing rather than technical. So you could say that they are intentionally crippled.

https://communities.intel.com/thread/33466

I recall those Acer Aspire One series netbooks that were popular 2-3 years ago. The Intel Atom versions limited RAM to 2MB but the AMD versions didn't.

Odd.. re post # 6 all my PCs/Laptops over the years and to-date have been AMD, and never shown over 3 GB

I think we're talking about 2 different issues. 32 bit versions of Windows have the 3GB limitation whatever the hardware. 64 bit doesn't.

In the case of some variants of the Intel Atom, it is a hardware limitation - the PC won't even boot if the RAM size is increased.