Vista 32 bit and 4Gb Ram

EJizzel

In a previous post I was deciding to go with either Vista 32bit or the 64 bit version of home premium on a HP laptop. Well I got the laptop preinstalled with the 64bit version and 4GB of ram, I was unimpressed from the beginning, not necessarily from Vista (I can really care less about Vista since im going to use vmware and install XP and get touchy and feely with Ubuntu and other flavors of linux). My disappointment was mainly due to the small screen size 12.1 inches, since it was a touch screen the screen looked blurry and the screen reflected everything (heres a link if your curious http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/product_detail.do?product_code=KN967UA#ABA[/url])

Well I decided to return the laptop for another one but no touch screen, 14.1 inches and Vista 32 bit. My question is I know theres a limitation with 32bit versions of windows only able to recognize 3 GIGs of RAM but if I decide to max it out and add another 1 GIG for using VMWare is it worth it or will it just go to waste.

undomiel

You can try enabling PAE to see if it will use that 4th gig otherwise it will probably get taken up by addressing. I have heard of instability issues but that is usually hardware specific and I have no idea of the performance under Vista.

Here's an explanation: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/08/14/699521.aspx

And some more: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

dynamik

You'll probably end up with 3.25-3.5 usable, depending on your configuration. Memory's cheap, and that'll give you another virtual machine or two. Not as good as four, but better than three. It's up to you.

Talic

I'd suggest downloading or ordering a copy of Vista 64 and reinstalling. I believe OEM licenses can upgrade to 64 bit version of Vista. Just make sure you get the key for windows off before you format.

I actually had to download mine by a torrent and it runs great with 4 GB of ram. MS wouldn't send me a disc because I got mine from my school.

blargoe

No 32 bit OS will ever have all 4GB of RAM available. Ever.

In Vista SP1, they "fixed" the CP applet to report that your system has 4GB installed, but you still don't really have 4GB that you can use.

dynamik

blargoe wrote:

No 32 bit OS will ever have all 4GB of RAM available. Ever.

In Vista SP1, they "fixed" the CP applet to report that your system has 4GB installed, but you still don't really have 4GB that you can use.

Check out that MS link undomiel posted. PAE can get 32-bit versions of Windows up to 32, 64, or 128gb of ram, depending on the version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

astorrs

PAE will allow Windows to see the extra RAM, but in a 32-bit O/S user processes will still be limited to 2GB (unless the process is large memory aware or supports AWE).

blargoe

I should have said "Desktop" OS...

My understanding is that no matter what you do with x86 XP or Vista with those fancy switches, you're still not going to get the full 4GB because the BIOS allocates a portion of memory to the PCI bus before the OS even gets a chance to see it. And if you do get it to work, you'd be likely to see problems because you're forcing it to access the memory that is supposed to be reserved for PCI. But if MS hadn't limited Vista x86 to 4GB, it could take advantage of the 36-bit addressing that PAE can offer (assuming the computer hardware supports it).

Either way, x64 is the best way to overcome this problem.

royal

The jist of it, is you won't actually get Windows to show 4GB of memory. Why? You need 64-bit for Windows to effectively show all your RAM. Windows x86 (32-bit) has a 4GB limitation. This limitation is not RAM limitation. It is the memory architecture allowing only 4GB for memory address space. Because of this, Windows will not show all your RAM as other devices need to use that memory address space. Since Windows has a 4GB limitation, part of this 4GB memory address space is used for hardware, ROMs, etc. in addition to RAM. Windows uses part of its memory management to address these devices in its memory address space and uses what is left over for RAM. Because of this, you will effectively see less RAM than what you actually have in your box. You can use a switch in your boot.ini /PAE which stands for Physical Address Extension (not sure about Vista since it doesn't natively use boot.ini anymore) that will allow Windows x86 to have a physical address space that exceeds 4GB. The only problem with doing this on an x86 machine, is the architecture still isn't designed for above 4GB so your ROM, hardware, etc. is only pushed up in the address space a bit so you still won't see all your RAM. So basically with 4GB of memory and without /PAE, you will see less RAM available than if you used /PAE which would allow Windows to provide you with more RAM, but still not all 4GB. With an x64 architecture, it will show all 4GB of memory and use the ROM, hardware, etc. in a different address space than RAM.