Re: XP Memory issue by Ken
Ken
Fri Apr 11 10:21:28 PDT 2008
On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:37:01 -0700, Jo <Jo@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have just bought a new PC running XP and have an issue with memory, I have
> 4gb or RAM but when I look at the windows system screen it only displays
> 2.98gb. Are there any settings I need to change?
No.
> I understand there are issues with 32 it XP running RAM but my old PC had
> 4gb and displayed 3.5gb.
All 32-bit versions of Windows (not just XP) have a 4GB address space.
That's the theoretical upper limit beyond which you can not go.
But you can't use the entire 4GB of address space. Even though you
have a 4GB address space, you can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM.
That's because some of that space is used by hardware and not
available to the operating system and applications. The amount you can
use varies, depending on what hardware you have installed, but is
usually around 3.1GB.
Your old computer and the new one have different hardware
configurations and each uses a different amount of that address space.
Your 2.98GB and 3.5GB are pretty much the two extremes of the usable
range you might get.
Note that the hardware is using the address *space*, not the actual
RAM itself. The rest of the RAM goes unused because there is no
address space to map it too.
> Is there any way I can force xp to see the extra RAM?
No.
Why do you need to, by the way? What apps do you run? Unless you run
particularly memory-hungry apps, very few people will see any
performance gain by having so much available memory in XP.
--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP - Windows Desktop Experience
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