August 29th, 2008
More Ram on 32 bits… and no :(
A couple of months ago I bought a new laptop so that I could improve my work-flow, and entertain myself while I’m on the go. Doing so I didn’t think about the fact that though 4 GB of RAM does sound nice I would only be able to use 3 of them due to the pre-installed 32 bit version of Vista. I figured later that it would be a possibility to upgrade to a 64 bit license later, but you can’t do that from Home Premium apparently.
Enough about that; the point is that for some reason after I installed SP1 I discovered that my system reported that I actually had 4 GB of RAM, (which put a smile on my face,) but I did doubt it being right.
After some Googling, I discovered that 32 bit OSes does support up to 8 GB of RAM, (wow,) but that really doesn’t matter because the catch is that you must have some kind of special chipset on your motherboard, (will get into that later.)
What I got out of the knowledge I browsed through was also that as the limit without such hardware is 4 GB. <<Alright!>>, I thought, <<this means that I actually get to use all of my RAM.>> But NO! Reading further there are more limits; You are actually limited to 4 GB TOTAL, this includes the Graphics Cards’ RAM. <<OK, but I do not have 1GB of Graphics Memory. So, where did it go?>> <<I don’t know…>> I read in several forums that if my Graphics have like 256 MB RAM I should be using about 4GB minus that; ergo 3,75 GB
Through this resource from Microsoft, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946003/ , I discovered that could run a System Information tool (Msinfo32.exe) and it would show me exactly how much of my physical memory is being used… to my disappointment, only 3GB. I should be able to use more, and I think it is very strange that I do not get more then exactly 3GB. Others get 3.5 or 3.25 or even 3.75.
A friend of mine once told me that as a matter of fact Vista always displays less RAM than it actually uses… Well, apart form what you can read from this, that is only partially true.
If there is anybody out there reading this and know how I can at least get the extra (4GB minus Graphics Card memory) GB out of my computer please tell ME NOW! I will love you forever!
Edit: 03.05.09 – 09:25AM
I have discovered that it might be impossible to get the extra RAM out of my 32bit systems;
Other hardware uses RAM bus as well and it is the RAM bus that limits the RAM you get to use.
August 28th, 2008
Hey you!
Finally I got use for my SQL server this is now my blog… ain’t it nice?
Hopefully I will use this and make it grow over time.
