what's the maximum memory windows XP (32-bit) will take or use? as i remember, it's 3GB but someone at work keep saying 4GB if you hack the register.

 

Its not something hackable.. its the 32 bit archecture.

 

so what's the verdict? 3GB or 4GB?

 

3GB. You can't hack it. You need a 64bit chip to see anything bigger (there just aren't enough digits on a 32bit chip).

 

I read that wrong !

YOU CAN'T HACK IT !! your just not tuff enough !

 

you read what wrong? iain said the same?!

 

I thought you could get it to see more than the 3Gb, servers can certainly see 4Gb on 32bit Windows, or is that because they are Xeon's ?

64 Bit OS different thing altogether

 

Awww Bless

 

Has to be a way

Back in the day...DOS could only "see" 640k. To see the rest of the RAM you had to load the "HIMEM" driver so that it could address the "upper" area memory..(edit: or was that EMM386 )

Think of it as splitting a large hard disk into two partitions as acting like two logical drives. (ok its nothing like that, but its the best lamens I could think of )

 

IIRC our VM's in uni can see 3.75 gig of RAM (2k3 SP2 AMD CPU's)

My home machine: XP will see 2.93 without memory mapping and 2 with it on, Vista 64 with memory mapping will then see the 4 gig however

 

On some Servers, Fujitsu in particular you have to change a setting in the Bios to allow the 32-bit OS to see and use the extra memory over 3Gb

 

32 bit MEANS 2 to the power of 32 - go work it out. It's the maximum address space that ANY 32 bit operating system can see

XP will say it can see 3 and a bit Gb the rest is memory mapped. (graphics cards and the like) To be able to USE more memory you have to go to 64 bit.

However after all that - the extra overhead of managing that memory means that there is a slight performance slow-down. The sweet spot for performance (i.e. gaming) is presently 4Gb.

Oh the 'registry hack' your friend is talking about is adding the /3GB parameter in the boot.ini file.

 

Windows XP Pro SP3 here with 4Gb of memory installed and My Computer shows 3.25Gb

 

It's a maximum of 4gb minus your graphics memory.

32bit can only address 4gb total memory.

 

My xp used to show 3.50gb

im on vista now so its shows 4gb

 

I thought that would restrict it to only use/see up to 3gb of the memory (/3GB). /PAE should be used to see more, although whether XP can use it is another thing...
Scrap that... XP can use 4gb (Technet) with /PAE switch on the boot.ini or with the /3GB switch can see 3gb with 1gb for main kernal process (usual is 50/50 split) Thats if you have 4gb installed.
Hope that helps!

 

thank you all for your input.

the business decided to pay a couple of grand to buy extra memory and upgrade all the PCs to 4GB, just because some developer developed a FAT application!