2gig vista premium, 4 gig vista ultimate?

i'm a little confused. people have told me 2 gigs of ram work fine with vista premium or business. but if i ever wanted to upgrade to 4 gigs, i would have to buy vista ultimate. is the only difference between ultimate and premium is that ultimate can recognize 4gigs of ram? basically what i'm trying to get is, what other reasons would people upgrade to ultimate? is it more stable or does it run faster than premium or business

ton

 

I'm about to confuse you further, sorry

All 32-bit operating systems (like the one you have now) only see 3-3.5gb of RAM max. I forget why this is right now, but either way. To see the full 4gb you'll need a 64-bit version of Vista or XP; the actual flavour of Vista doesn't matter, what matters is that it's the 64-bit version.

Example: my laptop shipped with 2 versions of Vista Business--32 bit and 64 bit. I've got 2gb of RAM in my system right now, but if I ever wanted to upgrade to 4gb I'd also need to upgrade to Vista Business 64bit.

Confusing I know, but hope this helps...

 

If you want to see/use 4GB then you need to make sure that your laptop meets the "hardware" requirements(chipset/BIOS/CPU) and you will also need a 64bit version of any OS(XP or VIsta) as Ackerson mentioned(read more about 64bit here). For most users, 2GB/3GB is fine and 64bit has its drawbacks(see the thread i linked aboved.)

Look here for reasons to upgrade to Ultimate. The MS page has a chart that compares the features of the edition.

 

People say you need to upgrade to Ultimate to use four gigs of RAM because Ultimate comes in both 32/64 bit flavors when you buy it retail.

 

Ultimate is more expensive than RAM itself..Its more expensive than most mobile phones ...Hence, Home premium is better

 

The confusion comes because most manufacturers only offer 64bit versions of Vista with Ultimate, leading people to think that if you want 64bit you must get Ultimate. However, you can get 64bit versions of any type of Vista, you just have to do it yourself. If you're willing to do a clean install, see my clean install guide (sig), which also has information on obtaining the 64bit installation discs.

 

oh ok i'm starting to understand. thanks for clearing things up

 

My college offers Vista Ultimate 32 bit.

Can I run it on 2 gigs of ram?

 

Hell you can even run Vista on 512 MB's of Ram but it won't run well. LOL any way, yes you can. The reason any variation of Windows NT ie. Vista cannot read the full 4 GB is because of the way they designed the OS. NT took a different approach on hardware-software interaction. In NT the OS has much more control over the hardware and does not allow applications full control of the hardware at any given time. This is different from DOS which allowed applications manipulating the hardware causing unsecure and relativley unstable systems. If you remember you good old copy of Windows 98, the reason you would get those nasty Blue screens is because of this interaction which causes a system crash. The Blue Screens in NT OS's have similar but not entirley the same causes.

Due to this interaction their is alot of overhead in the NT OS's which means lack of capability to read the full 32-bit memory or 2^32 bytes of memory.

The explanation of this "overhead" I am talking about had to do with the physical adress space known as the PAE of the OS can only address upto 4 GBs of memory some of which must be reserved for other peripherals or components such as your video card hard drive etc.

To learn a little more about the PAE and the overhead in NT based OS's go here http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/14/699521.aspx.

To undertand it you may need to know a little more about basic computer design.

 

Ok, so to clarify/summarize:
- All 32-bit versions of Vista, as well as all 32-bit versions of XP, work fine with 4GB of RAM. In all cases, Windows will report slightly less memory available (something like 3.5GB). They also work fine with less memory, and will show the correct amount of memory in these cases.
- All 64-bit versions of Vista or XP *also* work fine with 4GB of memory, but unlike a 32-bit OS, will report the full 4GB as being available in Windows.

The reason is that some memory addresses are used for other stuff (may store a copy of the BIOS, or may be mapped to some hardware), and thus can't be used to address memory as well.

Now, a 32-bit OS by definition has 32-bit wide addresses, which gives you an address space of 4GB, no matter how much RAM you actually have. A system with 512MB RAM still has a 4GB address space, it's just that 7/8ths of the addresses will remain unused.
The address space is simply a count of how many different addresses are possible. On a 32-bit system, you can represent 2^32 different addresses, and if each address points to one byte of memory, that gives you 2^32 byte, or 4 GB.

A 64-bit OS has 64-bit wide addresses, which gives you an insanely huge address space (current OS'es are limited to a handful of terabytes, I think, which should be enough for a couple of years)

Now here's the tricky part. Some addresses have to be used for other stuff. Windows must set aside a range of addresses for communicating with hardware and a few such tasks. Which means there are slightly fewer addresses left to actually address the memory.

If you have only, say, 2GB of RAM, that's not a problem. Your memory space is 4GB, so there's 2GB's worth of unused addresses, and Windows can just assign some of those to these "special tasks". That way, the full 2GB of RAM can be addressed with the remaining addresses just fine, and Windows will be able to report 2GB of available memory.

The same applies if you have 4GB RAM (or more) on a 64-bit system. Sure, we need 4GB's worth of addresses to point to the RAM, but that still leaves plenty of unused addresses for the special stuff. Again, Windows will be able to use all 4GB of RAM.

The problem is if you have 4GB of RAM on a 32-bit system.
If Windows was to address all of this memory, it'd have to use the *entire* address space, leaving nothing for all the special stuff. That wouldn't work, so instead, it's forced to first set aside a few hundred MB of addresses for the special stuff, and then use whatever is left over (usually around 3.5GB), to actually point to RAM. Thus, in this case, Windows will only report 3.5GB of RAM as being available. It will work fine, however, you just won't be able to use the last 500MB or so of your RAM.

 

Damn that was good!