what happens when you put 4 gigs of ram in a windows xp box?

[Kaido]

I've read a few different things on the net about it. It'd be sick (and mad expensive) to put four 1gb sticks of ram in a Windows XP systems, but how would it actually work? I've heard something along the lines of half a gig going to the PCI bus or something. What's the deal, does having 4 gigs cause lockup? What actually happens, and are there any issues there? Is there a better amount to get (assuming I have the cash to blow on it)?

 

[amdskip]

2gb should seriously be more than enough for anything you are doing. I have a college professor friend running fedora and he has dual opteron with 4gb of memory and 2 raptors in raid 0.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: amdskip
2gb should seriously be more than enough for anything you are doing. I have a college professor friend running fedora and he has dual opteron with 4gb of memory and 2 raptors in raid 0.

do you really think so? The most I've ever had was 1.5gb, back in the pc133 days, and I was pretty happy with it. I usually don't upgrade my main system for a few years at a time, so when I buy I save up and sink a lot into it. I figured 4 gigs might do wonders, but if 2 gigs will "suffice", I may do that too.

 

[neonerd]

u would get one kicka$$ system.....not needed though

 

[KoolDrew]

That would not be needed. It would be overkill unless you ran a server or something... And as amdskip 2GB is more then enough. Even 1GB is more then enough for some

 

[Shagga]

I have 2GB.

 

[iwantanewcomputer]

"what happens when you put 4 gigs of ram in a windows xp box?"
um...you have 4 gigs of ram.

no probs as long the mobo supports it

 

[imported_theEman]

I'm using 768MB and I hardly ever use more than 700MB of it. 4GB should be WAY more than enough. What do you plan on doing with all that extra RAM?

 

[BW86]

2GB is enough. 1.5GB is enough for alot of people

 

[erikistired]

windows xp would eat itself!

1gb should be the minimum, as has been said about 20 times, 2gb should be more than enough.

 

[sharkeeper]

Lots of misinformation here.

You will see 3.25~3.5GB in syspropsheet...

You must enable Physical Address Extensions, /PAE switch in boot.ini file. (to address full amount!)

Single applications will be limited to 2048MB each. This works well with me as I can have PS using 2GB and still have 2GB (or 6GB depending on which machine I'm on) available for other apps, etc.

Cheers!

 

[camara120]

sharkeeper, is there something you can edit in windows so applications can use up to 3GB of RAM?

 

[LifeStealer]

The sky will darken, frogs will fall from the clouds, and they'll serve ice water in hell

 

[ZL1]

huge overkill will happen, but it might be fun

1gb minimum for xp ? I remember when it was 512

sharkeeper what is PS ?



Thanks
Dan

 

[LifeStealer]

Originally posted by: ZL1
huge overkill will happen, but it might be fun

1gb minimum for xp ? I remember when it was 512

sharkeeper what is PS ?



Thanks
Dan

Photo Shop I'm guessing.

 

[nageov3t]

meh. for a home user, it wouldn't make much difference.

I've built some Win 2003 servers with 6 gigs -- you don't even notice the difference between 6 gigs and 1 gig until the box goes online and starts actually performing as a server.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: theEman
I'm using 768MB and I hardly ever use more than 700MB of it. 4GB should be WAY more than enough. What do you plan on doing with all that extra RAM?

InDesign CS + Illustrator CS + Photoshop CS + Painter 8 + Rhino 3D + whatever else I'm using that day

 

[erikistired]

Originally posted by: ZL1
huge overkill will happen, but it might be fun

1gb minimum for xp ? I remember when it was 512

sharkeeper what is PS ?



Thanks
Dan

just my personal preference, some of the games i play just love to eat up ram. my laptop has less than that, but it's maxed. if i could i'd have a gig in there too.

 

[sharkeeper]

To enable PAE:

Click Start, and then click Run.
Type X:\boot.ini, where X is the drive letter of the location of the boot files, Ntldr, Boot.ini, and so forth.
Modify the line that corresponds to your operating system by appending the switch /PAE.
Save the file, and then restart the computer.

PS is Photoshop.

Please remember that not all mainboards will support the full 4096MB despite them saying this! A lot of desktop chipsets will have a 3.5GB hard limit due to resource reservations. Server and workstation chipsets will *not* have this issue.

sharkeeper, is there something you can edit in windows so applications can use up to 3GB of RAM?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: (from MS)

Even with PAE enabled, the underlying architecture of the system is still based on 32-bit linear addresses. This effectively retains the 2 GB of application space and the 2 GB of kernel mode space because only 4 GB of addresses are available. However, multiple processes can immediately benefit from the increased RAM because they are less likely to encounter physical memory restrictions and begin paging. Additionally, applications can be modified to use the AWE API to allocate memory outside of the applications process space, bypassing the 2-GB limit for applications.

With PAE enabled, the operating system moves from a two-level linear address translation to a three-level address translation. The extra layer of translation is what provides access to physical memory beyond 4 GB. Instead of a linear address being split into three separate fields for indexing into memory tables, it is split into four separate fields; a 2-bit field, two 9-bit fields, and a 12-bit field that corresponds to the page size implemented by Intel Architecture (4 KB).

During a context switch the CR3 register is set by the operating system to point to a Page directory pointer index that is 2-bits wide. The first two bits are used as an index into this table, with the resulting value pointing to a Page directory. The first 9-bit field is then used to index into the Page directory. The indexed value then points to a Page table. The second 9-bit field is an index into the Page table. This value points to the actual page in memory where the desired byte is located. Finding this byte is a simple matter of using the remaining twelve bits of data to index into the page.



Cheers!

 

[ZL1]

sharkeeper, how do you reserve 2gb for PS ?


Thank you
Dan

P.S. when having so much ram, what would you recommend be done to the OS ? remove swap ?

 

[sharkeeper]

I don't reserve memory for applications as with 4GB there is enough for the kernal and PS to work comfortably. This will change dramatically with XP-64 but that is left for future discussion.

Regardless of the amount of physical memory, I never recommend turning off VM! PS will complain if it does not see a paging file. I use a 4GB fixed paging file on a dedicated, hardware cached RAID0 15k SCSI array.

EDIT:

I recommend 512 as the sweet spot for the majority of XP users. If they are going to be playing games or have a scanner, I recommend 1GB or more as needed.

Believe it or not, there are many computers >cough<Dell>cough< running XP with 128MB! I was working on such a fossil yesterday and it was painfully slow watching menus paint on the screen like jpeg's loading on dialup!

Cheers!

 

[ZL1]

Originally posted by: sharkeeper
I don't reserve memory for applications as with 4GB there is enough for the kernal and PS to work comfortably. This will change dramatically with XP-64 but that is left for future discussion.

Regardless of the amount of physical memory, I never recommend turning off VM! PS will complain if it does not see a paging file. I use a 4GB fixed paging file on a dedicated, hardware cached RAID0 15k SCSI array.

EDIT:

I recommend 512 as the sweet spot for the majority of XP users. If they are going to be playing games or have a scanner, I recommend 1GB or more as needed.

Believe it or not, there are many computers >cough<Dell>cough< running XP with 128MB! I was working on such a fossil yesterday and it was painfully slow watching menus paint on the screen like jpeg's loading on dialup!

Cheers!

gotcha ! no no, dont say xp64, I dont wanna have to upgrade again

reserved swap, eh ... Ive been drooling over the idea since I first played around with linux, howd u do it in xp ? is it a partition of 4gb that you keep open just for the swap ?
Id love to be able to do it like lin does it, hidden and even separate drive option


512mb ram or 512mb page ?


I believe you


Thanks
Dan

 

[CraigRT]

overkill like wow.
complete waste of $

 

[sharkeeper]

NEVER partition the OS physical drive and put the paging file on that (second) partition! Yes I have a dedicated disk for such use. Dedicated scratch disk too.

With 512MB a good start is 512MB min 2048MB max. If the min is too small and Windows keeps increasing it on the fly adjust it upwards. If this even happens you should probably increase it anyways as you will never notice 2GB of "missing" disk space nowadays.

overkill like wow.
complete waste of $

Not for those of us that actually need and use it

Cheers!

 

[ZL1]

Originally posted by: sharkeeper
NEVER partition the OS physical drive and put the paging file on that (second) partition! Yes I have a dedicated disk for such use. Dedicated scratch disk too.

With 512MB a good start is 512MB min 2048MB max. If the min is too small and Windows keeps increasing it on the fly adjust it upwards. If this even happens you should probably increase it anyways as you will never notice 2GB of "missing" disk space nowadays.

overkill like wow.
complete waste of $

Not for those of us that actually need and use it

Cheers!

thats not quite what I meant
I meant using boot disk and a second drive and having a small bit of the second as swap or using a separate drive for that
now how did you achieve this in windows ???? [or your using a formated drive ?]
see Id like it hidden as in linux

what if you have 1gb of ram ? and since this thread was about 4gbs, what if you have 4gbs of ram ? [swap size I mean]



Thank you
Dan

PS: nice screenshot, what do you guys do ?