XP with more that 4GB

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark Natto
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Mark Natto

I just build a new PC , purely to run XP64, all went fine, XP64 installed
with all 8GB without a single hiccup, except for my DVB-T card cinema
software wont work, as its a crucial part of my work, I left with 2 choices,
Vista Business64 or back to normal XP.

As I am not too keen on Vista, even on a Dual 3.6GHz with 8GB , I would
rather the resources goes to my programs rather than the OS so I decided to
move back to XP, the BIOS sees all 8GB and XP sees 3.5GB, I am just
wondering if there are any utilities that can make use of the memory above
the address, ie, such as turning it into a cache/HDD ??
 
Mark said:
I just build a new PC , purely to run XP64, all went fine, XP64 installed
with all 8GB without a single hiccup, except for my DVB-T card cinema
software wont work, as its a crucial part of my work, I left with 2 choices,
Vista Business64 or back to normal XP.

As I am not too keen on Vista, even on a Dual 3.6GHz with 8GB , I would
rather the resources goes to my programs rather than the OS so I decided to
move back to XP, the BIOS sees all 8GB and XP sees 3.5GB, I am just
wondering if there are any utilities that can make use of the memory above
the address, ie, such as turning it into a cache/HDD ??
Click to expand...
Normal XP, or any 32bit OS maybe, only addresses 4gb of memory space.
That's all you can get out of a 32bit rock. And some is taken by
hardware reducing you down to 3.x Gig. This is expected.

2 to the power of 32 (32bits) = 4,294,967,296 bytes. 4 Gig.
 
Regarding "...the resources goes to my programs rather than the OS ...." -
Vistas memory manager is more capale than XPs - it makes use of memory that
is not being utilized - it release resources as required for applications.
 
As I am not too keen on Vista, even on a Dual 3.6GHz with 8GB , I would
rather the resources goes to my programs rather than the OS so I decided to
move back to XP, the BIOS sees all 8GB and XP sees 3.5GB, I am just
wondering if there are any utilities that can make use of the memory above
the address, ie, such as turning it into a cache/HDD ??
Click to expand...


I assume you're running 32-bit XP.

All 32-bit versions of Windows (not just XP) have a 4GB address space.
That's the theoretical upper limit beyond which you can not go.

But you can't use the entire 4GB of address space. Even though you
have a 4GB address space, you can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM.
That's because some of that space is used by hardware and is not
available to the operating system and applications. The amount you can
use varies, depending on what hardware you have installed, but can
range from as little as 2GB to as much as 3.5GB. It's usually around
3.1GB.

Note that the hardware is using the address *space*, not the actual
RAM itself. The rest of the RAM goes unused because there is no
address space to map it too.
 
Thanks all
I knew about the 4GB limit, I were asking if there are any utils that can
make use of the space above that such as turning the extra unused memory
into a scratch/cache ?
I am tempted to get another DVB card thats XP64 compaitable, my current one
(Cinergy 2400i DT) suppose to do it with full drivers and software, but
somehow the cinema software just hangs . If I have time, I might just image
the current OS and stick Vista Business 64 on and see how well it works.
Thanks again
 
AJR said:
Regarding "...the resources goes to my programs rather than the OS ...." -
Vistas memory manager is more capale than XPs - it makes use of memory
that is not being utilized - it release resources as required for
applications.
Click to expand...

That may be the claim but it doesn't square with reality. I cannot get more
than around 700M free with Vista (2Gb installed). I can get far more than
that under XP and most things run faster. My high definition video editor
just cannot get the resources it requires to even consider rendering videos
under Vista even if the memory is fully expanded to 4GB (3.3Gb actual) yet
runs quite adequately under XP with 2 Gb memory.
 
M.I.5¾ said:
That may be the claim but it doesn't square with reality. I cannot get more
than around 700M free with Vista (2Gb installed). I can get far more than
that under XP and most things run faster. My high definition video editor
just cannot get the resources it requires to even consider rendering videos
under Vista even if the memory is fully expanded to 4GB (3.3Gb actual) yet
runs quite adequately under XP with 2 Gb memory.
Click to expand...

Boy! that says a lot for Vista. :-)
 
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