Gizmo's Freeware Forum - View Single Post - Interesting write up on Memory In 32bit Vista

23. Sep 2009, 07:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tony

I seem to have had some trouble logging in, worst than usual. Thanks Gizmo, have managed to get in.

I cam across this site that I thought a very interesting read on Memory
http://www.geoffchappell.com/viewer....nse/memory.htm
And, I thought it worth sharing

Tony

Tony,

I'm afraid the writer of this article is mistaken.

Running a 32 bit OS means that all pointers are restricted to 32 bit making the maximum addressable range 4Gb. The actual amount of available RAM on 32 bit Windows will be constrained by devices that need to be mapped into RAM to be available. It used to drop to 3Gb when I ran 32 Windows on my main PC as the NVidia 8800GTX graphics card I have consumed 1Gb!

Assuming you have no hardware memory mapping issues 32 bit Windows (NT4 up) will divide the address space into two. 2Gb for the OS and the rest for user processes. You can boot these versions of Windows with the /3G switch, which will give Windows 1Gb and the rest to user related stuff.

Accessing memory outside of the 4Gb limit would have required the same tricks that we used back in the old DOS days. I don't really thing Microsoft wanted to go there.

Rik