I have an HP Elitebook 8540W, Model: XT905UT#ABA, purchased in 2011, with 4GB of RAM, running Windows 7, Version 6.1, Build 7601, SP 1, 32-Bit OS.  The graphics card is an Nvidia Quadro FX-880M.

While running SolidWorks 2010 even with a modest 4 files open, there are many lockups, and I have discovered, using the Win 7 Performance Monitor, that there is very little of the 4GB of memory available to the application, less than 1GB, and typically the available memory drops to less than 30 MB .  On checking the "Resource Monitor" in Win 7, it shows the graphics card is reserving a whopping 1024 MB of memory.  I know that the 32 Bit OS can only allocate a maximum of 2GB per application, but SW is only seeing about half of that.  The HP service help tech said that the allocation of graphics card memory was done when the notebook was configured, and cannot be changed.

  How can I fix this issue?  I was told by the SW reseller that going to a 64Bit version of Win 7 and SW will allow more memory, and the IT department is working on this, but I need a solution ASAP.  Is there another OS configuration I can try?  Can this be done through the BIOS setup?  I don't understand why this laptop - a "Work Station" cannot run a typical engineering tool like SolidWorks without running out of memory and locking up. It is costing me a lot of time.  If the 32 Bit system is limited in memory available, then this should be stated somewhere.  One in 10 crashes will give a pop-up in SW that says there is "insufficient memory..." to run some task, but then crashes anyway!?  Am I expecting too much of SW to tell me that I cannot open any more files because there is insufficient memory? Have the later versions of SW fixed this issue?  Thanks.