A coworker installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro on a desktop that has 16 GB of RAM installed. In System Properties, Windows reports that only 4 GB of RAM is available. What is the most likely reason for this symptom?
The 32-bit (x86) edition of Windows 10 was installed
Windows 10 Home was installed instead of Windows 10 Pro
Only Windows 10 Enterprise can recognize more than 4 GB of RAM
A type-1 hypervisor has reserved the remaining 12 GB of RAM
Windows client editions that are 32-bit (x86) can address a maximum of 4 GB of physical RAM. If the x86 installation media is used, Windows will only report (and use) up to 4 GB no matter how much memory is physically present. The Windows edition (Home, Pro, Enterprise) does not affect this limit, and a hypervisor would not change the total amount of physical RAM the host OS reports-it would simply allocate part of it for guests. A 64-bit (x64) installation of any Windows 10 edition supports far more RAM (Windows 10 Pro x64 supports up to 2 TB). [Memory Limits for Windows Releases]
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