Quote:
Originally Posted by onlymovies
Can Vista address more then 2gigs of ram? How high can Vista address?
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This is CONSTANTLY Debated and argued and was definitely something I lost a bit of sleep over as I desperately searched google for a Definitive answer? and here it is:
About 90% of ignorant morons out there will tell you
?theoretically XP has a 4 Gig ram limit?
?you Should be able to run 4 GIGS on XP?
?XP has a ram limit of 4 GIGS?
and on and on?
In all my searching Only 1 person actually stated that they had achieved 4 GIGs on a XP 32 bit?. And that is basically the KEY factor(32-bit VS 64-bit). One of the factors is the ability of the OS to do PAE(Physical address Extension). This function (PAE) is necessary to address more then 2 GIGS of RAM.
At first? on windows XP 32bit? you could manually activate PAE and get up to 4 GIGS. However, a vulnerability was exposed somewhere down the line and in XP Service Pack 2 they activated DEP (I don?t know what that stands for). DEP locked down something in the OS that Nullified the ability to get up to 4 GIGS.
Only 1 person out of MANY actually claimed to have achieved 4 GIGS on XP 32 bit? and that was nullified by Service Pack 2. The rest were running around with 2 GIGS while saying ?You should be able to do 4 Gigs?
Now, here?s how it relates to your question about Vista?.
Vista comes in 32 bit and 64 bit?. Just like XP... and as previously mentioned in this thread? 64 bit natively(by default) runs PAE which I think can go up to 64 or 128 GIGS assuming you had some crazy setup.
!!!! You need 64 bit architecture (which has PAE by default) to get to 4 or more GIGS!!!
On 32 bit XP or Vista you will end up at about 3.1 GIGS depending on your chipset/motherboard? etc.
I realize this is an extremely long post when all it comes down to is 32 bit ?VS- 64?. But now that you know the history of it?. You can dismiss all these fucking assholes that are going to tell you that you can do 4 GIGS on a 32 bit system? (especially when they have not actually done it them selves).