More than 4GB RAM on 32 bit Windows XP?

[Kadence]

Would there be any use to have 8GB of RAM on 32 bit XP non-Professional? I know that a single process is limited to 4GB (minus the memory card's memory) in 32 bit, but if you have multiple programs running, would they be able to use more than 4GB combined?

 

[genec57]

A 32 bit OS will not recognise more than 4gb.

 

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: Kadence
Would there be any use to have 8GB of RAM on 32 bit XP non-Professional? I know that a single process is limited to 4GB (minus the memory card's memory) in 32 bit, but if you have multiple programs running, would they be able to use more than 4GB combined?

single process is limited to 2GB unless it is coded with 36-bit extensions.

 

[pallejr]

Microsoft made the choice in 32bit xp and vista to ignore anything above 4G, so 8 is of no use

 

[Nothinman]

Would there be any use to have 8GB of RAM on 32 bit XP non-Professional? I know that a single process is limited to 4GB (minus the memory card's memory) in 32 bit, but if you have multiple programs running, would they be able to use more than 4GB combined?

A single process is limited to 2G, not 4G (3G if using the /3GB kernel boot switch and the process is LargeAddressAware) no matter what. Some 32-bit processes use AWE to work around the limitation but they can still only have 2G(or 3G...) mapped at once.

And on top of that MS made the decision to cripple their PAE implementation in 32-bit Windows clients so that they'll never touch physical addresses above 4G. So it's even more worthless.

 

[hasu]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
A single process is limited to 2G, not 4G (3G if using the /3GB kernel boot switch and the process is LargeAddressAware) no matter what. Some 32-bit processes use AWE to work around the limitation but they can still only have 2G(or 3G...) mapped at once.

And on top of that MS made the decision to cripple their PAE implementation in 32-bit Windows clients so that they'll never touch physical addresses above 4G. So it's even more worthless.

When I installed 4GB in 32bit Windows it reported only 3.25 GB. Can 32bit Linux use more than that?

 

[Acanthus]

Vista 64bit is fantastic... however make sure you need the RAM before you start shuffling OSs to cram more memory in.

 

[Nothinman]

When I installed 4GB in 32bit Windows it reported only 3.25 GB. Can 32bit Linux use more than that?

32-bit Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows Server Enterprise, etc. Pretty much every 32-bit OS except for Windows clients. Your BIOS has to support memory remapping to make the memory available but that's it.