Over 2gb on windows xp pro

danuk22 · 15 Mar 2006 at 11:59

Hi There

Just a quick one,

My collegue is a 3d animator and has a good motherboard that has 4 slots for his DDR2 RAM

We are looking to upgrade but wondered if windows xp pro recognises over 2gb or not as we have heard that it just dont use anything higher than 2gb.

thanks !

quadboi · 15 Mar 2006 at 19:54

It doesnt NEED more than 2gb but still can use

Dr Zoidberg · 15 Mar 2006 at 20:44

XP Pro can address upto 4GB being a 32bit OS

By definition, a 32-bit processor uses 32 bits to refer to the location of each byte of memory. 2^32 = 4.2 billion, which means a memory address that's 32 bits long can only refer to 4.2 billion unique locations (i.e. 4 GB).

In the 32-bit Windows world, each application has its own “virtual” 4GB memory space. (This means that each application functions as if it has a flat 4GB of memory, and the system's memory manager keeps track of memory mapping, which applications are using which memory, page file management, and so on.)

This 4GB space is evenly divided into two parts, with 2GB dedicated for kernel usage, and 2GB left for application usage. Each application gets its own 2GB, but all applications have to share the same 2GB kernel space.

found at http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?ID=69

So yes it can use more than 2Gb of memory

Street · 15 Mar 2006 at 23:34

XP won't be able to use all of the 4gigs if you put them in. The max it will probably see will be around 3.2gigs due to the way it works (something to do with memory addresses being reserved IIRC).

If you want to be able to fully utilise all 4gigs then you would need to upgrade to a 64bit OS.