lol are you kidding me?Quote:
Ram= ramdom access memory
Its also the motherboard who decide who much ram you can install and use, some chipset are limited to eg. 8gb ram,dosent matter what os you run it on, it wont adress moore than 8gb of ram (on a 64bit os)
4gig of ram on win xp pro 32bit
Then windows xp pro cannot adress moore than about 3,25gb of ram,even if you have installed 4gb +...(32bit) ( it might show 4gig)
If you whoever run many programs and use moore than 3,25gb of ram, the os will switch to pagefile (pagefile is setup eiter automatic or you can set the size of the pagefile youreself),thats a part of the hdd windows will use instead of ram,or when the system ram is used up. If pagefile are used,the system will be slower because using the hdd as ram is not the fastest way to communicate with the cpu.
1 word "Ecc". Google it.
As for WinXP, yes they did limit it to 4gb of ram now it is not a software limit it's just what microsoft decided since 32bit drivers for OLD hardware could not use memory outside of a 4gb adress range. So now ALL hardware drivers that want a microsoft certified license must have both 32bit and 64bit drivers.
With all 32bit windows the limit can vary but yes the limit is 4gb, no none of the 4gb is wasted ALL of it can be used, anything above 4gb IS wasted.
The reason you THINK it's being wasted is due to the "PFN Database", this a big listing of all the memory adresses. Then you also have your HardWare drivers that also use RAM.
So ultimately the only reason 32bit is stuck with a limit of 4gb is because microsoft chose to as so they can prevent any troubles with those that have old/non-microsoft certified hardware.