XP Ram Issue

[Atrocities]

My system has 4.0 gigs of ram but only recognizes 3.0 gigs. I am running XP 32b SP3 on an C2D Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus - Quad 680I 775 MB. I am using Kingston Hyper 2.0gig 800 DDR2 modules.

Any suggestions?

[Kana]

XP will only recognize 3GB of RAM. Unless you have the 64-bit version, if I remember correctly.

[AgentZero]

A 32-bit OS can theoreticaly address a maximum of 4GB of memory, but that includes the memory on your video card and a few other things. I've 4GB in my 32-bit Vista, and it recognizes that there's 4GB, but only lets me have 3GB to play with. 64-bit OS's can theoretically address something like 16 exabytes of RAM, but practically speaking most limit themselves to somewhere between 128 and 512GB. Which should be enough for anyone.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

@AZ: At least until we get superconductors and/or quantum computers. Holodeck!

[Ironmanbc]

ya "theoreticaly"

[Slick]

*looks up "exabyte*

hmmmm...hmmmm....

!!!!!


*puts eyeballs back in head*

From Wiki: "A popular expression claims that "all words ever spoken by human beings" could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data, often citing a project at the UC Berkeley School of Information in support. The 2003 University of California Berkeley report credits the estimate to the website of Caltech researcher Roy Williams, where the statement can be found as early as May 1999. This statement has been criticized. Mark Liberman calculated the storage requirements for all human speech at 42 zettabytes, if digitized as 16 kHz 16-bit audio, although he did "freely confess that maybe the authors [of the exabyte estimate] were thinking about text."

*puts on goggles*

*looks up zettabytes*

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Googolplex

[Fyron]

You can address up to 36 bits of address space on a 32 bit OS (including some versions of win2k, winxp, win2003 and vista) if you enable PAE. Doing this tends to result in unexpected results (and crashes) from poorly coded programs, though, and is generally not recommended.

There is another hack that puts the kernel reserved address space into the upper 1 GB of physical address space (instead of the default upper 2 GB), thus allowing individual programs to use 3 GB of physical RAM instead of 2 GB. This has even more dire results, given that almost all programs are coded to expect the kernel functions to reside in the upper half of the 32 bit address space, and is even less recommended.

In summation, just be happy with the 3.1 to 3.6 GB of RAM you are able to use in your system. You wouldn't see a lick of difference from being able to address the remaining bits anyways.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Ah, Fyron, you are always a breath of fresh air, and cheerfulness.