4GB with vista

V-Spec

V-Spec

V-Spec

Soldato
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Someone told me that you can run 4GB of ram with Vista 32 with SP1, but I also read elsewhere that it only fixes a reporting issue with 4Gb and you don't actually get 4Gb,
Further to that, when I look in the performance tab, it shows 2Gb physical memory...

Is there any way whatsoever that I can properly run 4Gb with vista32 or do I have to get hold of a 64bit version? ;/

Cheers
 
Please use the SEARCH m8, there is countless Threads on this Topic.

You will NEVER get full use of 4GB of Memory in any 32bit OS not matter what anyone tells you.

The so called "Hack" is a Switch added to the Boot.ini to let it uses the left over Memory as a Page File.
 
Ok guys.. didn't realise this was such a well known thing, lol.. i'll get a copy sorted out..

Thanks anyway :)
 
According to my MSCE afflicted brother (though he does also hold a BSc in computers, so he's not a total dweeb), the address access extension dibber (or whatever it's called, I assume it is the "Hack" you refer to, sets things up (using 4 mask bits, though where they come from on an emulated 32bit bus, is anyone's guess) to switch 4GB "banks". Although this does not allow anything to use more than 4GB (or 3.6, or whatever's left after the OS address space is taken out of it), what it does allow is for different processes to see different blocks of 4GB. He swears he's tested and verified this on an 8GB win2k3 box in work.

I dunno, he could be talking mad dog's stools, he's bloody clever, but daft as a brush at times.
 
Even if your brother is Bill Gates :p, its wrong.

You cannot use 4GB in a 32bit OS, and in Laymans terms instead of all that goof above the Pagefile is normally your HDD used as Memory when Physical Memory runs out, well the "Hack" as I called it lets you use the unused Physical Memory as the Page File.

You will see 3GB to 3.5GB in Windows x86, he has not used 8GB in Win2003.

I also know peeps with Degrees, but they can not do it practically or dont have any common sence.
 
That's how I see it anyway.

I decided I would worry when I ran out of Ram ;)

And I marvel at him, he can code, he can understand object orientated systems and speaks Java. Yet, I, a graduate of the Dr Who school of engineering (poke it and talk convicning ****** until you poke the right bit), can get to the root of machine failures about 100 times quicker.



Oh and if he were Bill Gates, I'd steal all his money and syphon it to Linux projects, just to keep MS on their toes.
 
thegoonden said:
That's how I see it anyway.

I decided I would worry when I ran out of Ram ;)

And I marvel at him, he can code, he can understand object orientated systems and speaks Java. Yet, I, a graduate of the Dr Who school of engineering (poke it and talk convicning ****** until you poke the right bit), can get to the root of machine failures about 100 times quicker.
Click to expand...
I think your brother is referring to what Microsoft calls Address Windowing Extensions. This is just another flavour of virtual memory programming that allows us developers to reserve a part of our linear 4Gb virtual address range and request that the OS 'pages' down segments of that unused physical space above 4Gb on request into our nominated window.

Those of us that have been around long enough should be getting nasty flashbacks from the days of segmented memory architectures that we had hoped were long gone! While software paging (or 'windowing' as they seem to be calling it now) works it's horrible to code for and will never be taken up by the mainstream of developers that were happy to see the back of it.

Bottom line: upgrade to a 64 bit OS.
 
helmutcheese said:
You will see 3GB to 3.5GB in Windows x86, he has not used 8GB in Win2003.
Click to expand...

Sure he has, Win2003 supports PAE, which does work by using 36bits, and is supported by Pentium 2 or newer. Theoretically it can increase the memory to up to 64gig. Its not particularly comparible with the /3gb switch.

There is a downside though, only applications which are compiled to be PAE aware are able to make use of the PAE memory pool, and it can introduce other issues with standard software. That said it's very good if your running massive Microsoft SQL server databases, as MS-SQL is compiled to make use of PAE.

So Thegondens brother is correct, and the extra bits... They are part of Pentium 2 and above. Oh yeah, if you have an Athlon or AthlonXP (32bit), you actually have up to 40 bits to play with not 36, so you can get up to 128GB with PAE on those.

PAE will also work on Core2 Duo's, and Athlon64, although im not sure how many of the 64bit wide memorybus are available to PAE on those processors. In theory all 64 of them.

BUT as I already said, for 99.9% of users PAE is completely worthless as most applications simply cant access the memory.

Finally in 32bit, windows itself limits any single application to 2GB of userspace memory, so even if you have 3.25GB detected in your 32bit windows, you pretty much "NEED" to be multitasking to make use of it. For a gaming system its pretty much pointless to go past 2GB ram.

On a 64bit XP, or Vista64, all this is thrown out of the window, with a full 64bit memory bus, and no practical limits on how much memory can be used by applications. (Well different processors affect limits, a Pentium IV with EM64T can still only access 48GB memory, as it doesnt have a full 64bit memory bus). I believe AMD64's can access 128GB memory, and I have no clue about Core2 Duo.

EDIT: Having looked into this some more, both the AMD64, and Core 2 Duo do indeed have full 64bit address space capability, but to improve windows performace, the 64bit versions currently only use 48bits of address space, as using the full 64bits would actually slow it down. This still permits an astonishingly huge amount of memory, more than anyone could currently afford, or even fit onto a standard ATX motherboard. By the time this is a problem (if it EVER is), both CPU, and memory performance will have inreased so far that increasing the address space wont cause performance issues.
 
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helmutcheese said:
@ Corasik, thats all very tech and long to read but at the end of the day you need a 64bit OS to run 4GB of Memory fully and Physically. :)
Click to expand...

Quite right, and I did mention that at the end... But the guys brother was infact correct about windows 2003 and 8GB of memory. Its just pointless outside the server environment.

64Bit XP/Vista for the win :)
 
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