4 GB limit or less?

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Guest

I have a friend who's system won't see past 2.75 GB of Ram. He claims that a
white-paper told him that although MS says it supports 4GB, it really will
not unless it's 64-bit. I told him I thought this was firmware issue.

Thoughts?
 
With 32 bit Windows it depends on the motherboard. 2.75 GB seems a little
low. Usually with 4 GB you can see around 3.25 GB. Does he have the /PAE
switch in his boot.ini?
 
The /3GB switch may make it look like XP sees more ram but it can actually
slow down your system. Normally the kernel gets 2 GB of address space and
processes get another 2 GB regardless of how much actual ram is installed.
The /3GB switch changes this to 1 GB for the kernel and 3 GB for processes.
Some graphics programs and database programs may run a bit faster with this
switch as they manipulate large amounts of data in ram. For normal use
squeezing the kernel into 1 GB may actually slow things down by causing more
paging to disk. Try the /PAE switch.
 
I have a friend who's system won't see past 2.75 GB of Ram. He claims that a
white-paper told him that although MS says it supports 4GB, it really will
not unless it's 64-bit. I told him I thought this was firmware issue.
Click to expand...

It certainly could be, I've got a box that won't see more than 2.8. A
64-bit chip isn't enough, you need a 64-bit OS to get past the limit.
The problem is that you get 4gb of *TOTAL* address space. Things
other than memory take priority, though--things like your video cards
etc.
 
I have 3.0Gb of RAM in my system and XP sees and uses it just fine.
No problems. No issues.
 
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