Physical Ram Limit

Excuse naiive question, I have upgraded physical Ram in Gigabyte 8PenXP Dual DDr PC. Installed 4 GB maximum according to motherboard manual if using XP.
Bios agrees 4GB Windows says 3583MB.

I amd told that this is correct and that the absent 517MB is being used by the bios for PCI support.

Is this correct, what is the story about the limit?

 

This is expected. the various components on your machine have reserved space. On servers, you run /PAE to get around this problem. I've honestly never tried that for xp. whatchu doing that you need 4 gigs in a workstation?

 

Although it may bend your mind to do so, read this article....

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;888137

 

1) Busy system for graphics,gaming and local network host.
2) Got an offer hard to refuse

 

Wow, Dez, my mind IS bent after that.

Now the question is whether disabling the PAE is worth regaining the eighth of "misplaced" memory?

Johanna

 

So IOW if you have 4 GB + RAM, Windows will under-report it as 3.5 GB? Or is that only if you have onboard video, which would need system RAM?

 

Joanna

It is clearly not a good idea to enable PAE unless you know that all your driver can handle it

 

haha Told you it was a mind bending Kb article. Its almost as clear to understand as Microsoft Windows CALs haha. I understood it with some thought, but i am wondering how many non I.T professionals would make sense of it, like half of Microsofts KB articles.

 

Onclejean,
The only problem I have been having with my memory is..um..something, but I forget!

Seriously, XP is a memory pig. A user can expect dramatic improvement in system performance with good quality memory sticks, especially if they max out the mobo. I haven't ever seen a system with more than 2 Gigs, so I was curious why you needed so much, too. In your experience, does the boost from the extra memory justify the upgrade?

Would you recommend the investment to a serious gamer, or would your advice be not to bother? Is it overkill, okay, or barely sufficient for your needs?

Just curious. I'm not a gamer, or running a server, and I can tell the difference between 512 and a gig on my computer. What does 4 gigs feel like? Would you mind sharing your system specs?

I know I ask a lot of questions, but I consider the day a failure if I don't learn a few things on the BBS!!

Johanna

 

Johanna

It makes a very big difference, I had 2GB before and had the opportunity to get the new 4GB 9faster Kingstom memory)at a good swap price.

Can I attach an html report of the full system specs?

I will reply tomorrow

 

Crikey!
4 GB memory. It wasn't long ago when 4GB was HUGE for a HDD.
I've got 1GB memory and can't find a way to use more than half of it, even if I run about 30 IE pages and a few applications.

 

Sure, and I can remember when a 500KB hard disk was huge; but the proof of the pudding is in the eating! I don't think the IE pages use a lot of RAM, you are not looking at them full screen & DirectDraw/DX9?
Windows XP Pro+SP2 will just stagger along with 512MB RAM, run quite nicely with 1GB RAM unless you have Adobe Photoshop CS. Very smooth with 2GB except for very large graphics and some games and with 4GB it really flies!

My system uses over 512GB just for the PPI stuff. There really is a noticeable difference in peformance of games and graphics linked to memory size (and quality, it would be not much use having 4GB of low grade RAM) and of course type and speed of hard disk. I went to the Seagate SATA caviar hard disk configured as a RAID but the very high speed was coupled with unreliability and when a RAID crashes you really have to eat s--t to restore the system. With disks split and the large memory i have got what I wanted.

 

With disks split and the large memory i have got what I wanted.

That's certainly the key with a PC - to get one that does what you want it to do and does it well.