Quote:
Originally Posted by twistedone
Also found out, a little late, that because I'm using a 32bit Operating System, It will only recognize just a tad over 2 Gigs of the 4 Gigs of system memory that I have. In order for it to recognize all 4 gigs, I'd have to install a 64 bit Operating System. I so don't like the idea of getting Windows Vista.
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Well, 32-bit Windows can address 4GB, but it has to give memory addresses to things like your video memory and other hardware devices, so that means Windows can only usually use 3.12GB of the address space for RAM. It's the same reason DOS had a 1024KB address space but a 640KB RAM limit. Do you have two 1GB video cards or something? That's the only time I've heard of people not being able to see at least 3GB.
64-bit Vista (or XP Pro x64 if you can get drivers) doesn't usually help unless you're running 64-bit software, though, and it might slow things down. Since most software is 32-bit it has to run through the WOW64 emulation layer. Each application is still limited to a virtual 32-bit address space, and I think each thread is limited to 2GB.