32-bit Windows and 4gb+ RAM thoughts
by z3n on Feb.09, 2009, under Notes
I’ve been reading some articles about this, and figured out that despite the useless speculations all over the place there is no way to make windows regonize more than 3.25gb or 3.5gb, due PCI and other devices memory allocation 32-bit windows is unable to make the whole 4gb avaliable for the programs.
The explanation is a bit complicated, but resuming 32-bit systems can’t handle more than 4gb total memory and because of the other devices on your computer you might not even be able to reach the full 4gb, so depending on your video card and other stuff that got built-in memory you will get your total ram deducted from it.
Although 64-bit OS might sound like a great solution for you being able to use the whole ram you got (if you got 4gb+) it might be a real pain, since not all programs got a 64-bit version.
Apart from that, i saw some comments about twecking the windows boot.ini in order to gain more memory or to allocate a maximum ammount to kernel:
/3GB switch will make kernel have a maximum of 1gb memory while other programs will have 3gb (theorically) — for me this switch is a total crap, it slowed the system, according to microsoft windows take a half of the ram as limit for kernel, so if you have 4gb it will take 2gb as maximum of kernel memory.
/pae switch this will enable access to extended memory, this works only on intel machines with specific chipsets, check microsoft site for more info. This will NOT fix the 4gb issue on windows 32-bit only on 64-bit.