Toshiba Satellite A500-ST56X1 User Manual page 29

For users of a 32-bit version of Windows: If your computer is configured
with two 2 GB memory modules or more, the memory might be displayed
as approximately 3 GB only (depending on the computer's hardware
specifications).
This is correct because the operating system usually displays the available
memory instead of the physical memory (RAM) built into the computer.
Various system components (like the video adapter's GPU and PCI
devices like Wireless LAN, etc.) require their own memory space. Since a
32-bit operating system cannot address more than 4 GB of memory these
system resources overlap the physical memory. It is a technical limitation
that the overlapped memory is not available to the operating system.
Even though some tools might display the actual physical memory built
into your computer, the memory available to the operating system will still
be approximately 3 GB only.
Disks
Hard disk drive or
Solid state drive
Additional hard disk drive sizes may be introduced.
User's Manual
This computer is equipped with the following
types of Solid State Drive(SSD),hard disk
drive(HDD).The capacity of each hard disk drive
model is different.
SSD
64GB
128GB
256GB
HDD
120GB
160GB
200GB
250GB
320GB
500GB
640GB
Please note that part of the hard disk drives
overall capacity is reserved as administration
space.
Satellite A500/A500D
1-5