OT: Need Vista help suggestions

[AgentZero]

Fyron said:
The actual limit in win32 is somewhere around 3.5GB, depending on how the motherboard chipset reserves hardware address space.

I thought it could handle 4GB, but most people only saw 3GB because Windows takes 500MB as protected kernel something or other space, then it addresses the video card, which tend to be 512MB in most cases, which only left it 3GB worth of addresses to give to the RAM.

I have 32-bit Vista running with 4GB of RAM installed, and Vista recognizes that I have 4GB of memory, but only shows 3GB as the total available.

[Randallw]

ah well that's good. I'm getting all I paid for.

I read it was because it could only count the number of bits of ram up to a power of 32.

[Fyron]

Romulus68 said:
Play in Windowed mode. It seems to run a thousand times better. Not sure why, but it does.

Resolution explains a great deal.

AgentZero said:
RAM stuff

Physical memory and address space are different beasts, and it all gets pretty confusing. A lot of the limits have to do with MS' marketing decisions, as per the charts here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...78(VS.85).aspx

Randallw said:
I read it was because it could only count the number of bits of ram up to a power of 32.

That's only true, at the physical hardware layer, if PAE is not enabled. Its been around for a decade or so, and it allows memory addressing to use 36 bits instead of 32. Whether or not specific operating systems use it properly is purely up to marketing. The non-server versions of Win32 do not normally support PAE, even though there is no technical reason why every version of Windows 2000, XP and Vista 32 bit can't support 64 GB physical RAM.