4 gigs of ram. which operating system must i use to take advantage of it?

I have 4 gigabytes of ram. i thought that xp supported up to 4 gigs of ram until i read on another thread that it does not. It also inferred that vista 32 bit would not use all 4 gigs as well. is this true? i have 64 bit vista, but i was looking to switch to XP ultimate.

 

There is no OS called XP ultimate. There is XP Home Edition, XP Professional Edition, XP Media Center Edition, XP Tablet PC Edition..

It basically doesn't matter which edition it is as long as it is the 64-bit version of that edition.

 

Any 64 bit OS will use all of it. Even 32 bit ones will use most of it, (even if not all of it is directly addressed).

 

That's what I meant.

I also question the legality of that project.


The main point is, you need to use a 64-bit operating system to use ~3.5GB+ of RAM.

 

i own XP pro and i use my cd key for that . they also say on the site taht you should use a legit cd key.

 

32 bit XP SP1 supports 4GiB of RAM with PAE enabled and a few of the 32 bit Linux desktop distros now default to a PAE kernel on compatible systems and support up to 64GiB of RAM.

 

Does SP3 do the same?


How do you find XP drivers for your cpu?

 

I think I saw Windows Update provide a driver update for my processor a while back... see if that picks up something. You could go to Intel's website (or AMD's website) and hunt for driver updates there for your CPU.

 

ill give it a whirl. however, i dont think it will work as ive looked all around and many other users have the same problems.

 

32bit does not support more than ~3.3GB of Ram, sp1 or not- enabling PAE doesn't do crap! If you believe it does, I've got some ocean front property for sale in Arizona

XP Pro x64 is also a piece of junk, IMO.

 

There are a couple of reasons why PAE might not give you 4GiB with a 32 bit OS.

1. The OS itself limits what you can use. XP SP2/3 and Vista SP1 OSes will not give you full use of 4GiB of RAM. Probably includes Vista(pre SP1) and W7 Beta but haven't confirmed.

2. The hardware does not support it.

PAE basically extends your 32 bit address to 36 bits and allows up to 64 GiB of addressing however each application will normally be limited to 32 bits of address space.
AFAIK XP SP1 is capped to 4GiB of RAM by the OS just as Vista home basic 64 bit is capped to 8 GiB RAM and Vista home premium 64 bit to 16 GiB RAM.

Note that this is not meant to be a recommendation to use XP SP1.​

 

Not sure how many times i will say this... PAE will not work. You need special PAE-aware drivers to take advantage extended address. PAE is mainly for server use.

If you enable it, it will just eat more CPU time and give you 64bit incompatibilities while your still on a 32bit OS. Oh and did i mention it doesnt work.

Microsoft disabled PAE addressing after service pack 2 because of endless driver problems.

 

^

This man speaketh the truth.

PAE is useless and does nothing. If you want to use 4gb or more of ram get a 64bit OS. Simple as that

 

I think your missing the point The post was in response to someone claiming XP SP1 could "not support more than ~3.3GB of RAM and enabling PAE doesn't do crap!" which I have shown it can and to answer the OP's question of whether or not he could access all 4GiB in RAM with XP SP3 or Vista which I've said can not be done (including using PAE).

But just to sum up, the only problem I noticed was the webcam and I did not test every single device since it wasn't my intention to use this OS I couldn't see the point in putting in the time plus this HP notebook already has issues finding drivers for XP regardless of PAE or SP. As far as performance loss, I did not notice any even when running graphics benchmarking with or without PAE. Anyway, no BSODs and it seemed to work OK for me but as I said in my previous post, I would not recommend XP SP1 as todays OS.

No they did not disable PAE addressing, they limited physical address space to 4GiB. If you have hardware DEP (NX) enabled then PAE is enabled/required. IMHO I guess it was a lot easier to do this than fix/check every driver for compatibility. Besides 4GiB was a lot for most people back then and as a plus (for MS) it gives people more incentive to upgrade to the next OS when they find their ever increasing memory is not fully supported.

IMHO 64 bit is the way of the future and the better way to go if your able but there will still be people who have their reasons for using/wanting a 32 bit OS.

Oh, and by the way about the webcam, IIRC it was a MS driver. Using 32 bit Fedora 10 desktop OS which installed a PAE kernel by default, the webcam worked fine and the OS provides up to 64GiB of RAM support, I've not tested for 64GiB and probably never will do, maybe this time next year 4GiB SODIMMs will be cheap enough for me to have 8GiB of RAM but 4GiB is more than enough for now, at least for me.

 

Vista Home Basic 64-bit: 8 GB
Vista Home Premium 64-bit: 16 GB
Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate 64-bit: a whopping 128 GB

I wonder why Microsoft cap's the Basic and Home Premium memory limits. Doesn't make sense.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-Vista-Maximum-Supported-RAM-44487.shtml

 

I would recommend a 64-bit edition of Vista, or wait until W7 is out, and get a 64-bit edition of that.

reason being, if you're going with XP, then ~3.5GB of your memory will just sit there, unused, for the most part. In Vista, unused memory serves as cache, speeding up your most used programs and files. The improvement is quite big, IMHO. On my system, C2D 2,2GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM HDD, 1GB Turbo Memory - Vista is actually faster than Linux. Well, that is, booting and shutdown of Linux is faster than Windows, but apart from that, launching apps, working with files, watching videos and playing audio, Windows is faster than Linux, reason being, my guess, the better handling of memory in Windows. In Vista, all my memory (4GB) is used all the time. In Linux, my computer rarely uses more than 400MB, leaving 3.6GB unused. That is 3.6GB that serves no use in speeding up my computer.

This is the reason for recommending that you'd get Vista, and get 64-bit version, so you can access all your memory. Good luck.

 

PAE support in Linux and *bsd (including MacOS), which is generally turned on by default, does exactly what the OP stated in his original post. It allows the OS to utilize the full 64GB of address space, while each individual process is limited to a maximum of 3GB virtual address space.

When compiling the linux kernel, there is a separate setting that allows the OS to assign more than 3GB of virtual memory to an individual process. In order to actually use more than 3GB, an application must be specially written and compiled with PAE support. This setting does cause problems with some hardware; for that reason, it is rarely enabled.

As "0.0" already mentioned a few times, 32-bit XP and Vista do support PAE, but unlike other OSes, won't address more than 4GB of memory under any circumstances. The most obvious reason for this is greed.