On 12/22/2010 1:35 PM PT, Ken Blake, MVP typed:

A couple days ago, I upgraded my old 32-bit Windows XP Pro. SP3 (IE6)
system/computer/system to an Intel i7 with 6 GB of RAM. I know that
32-bit operating systems/OS' cannot see all that RAM due to old software
designs' limitations. Currently, my working Windows only sees about 2.5
GB of physical RAM (shouldn't it be 3 GB though?).

No, the amount it will see varies, depending on your hardware.

All 32-bit client versions of Windows (not just XP/Vista/7) have a 4GB
address space (64-bit versions can use much more). That's the
theoretical upper limit beyond which you can not go.

But you can't use the entire 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 is not available to
the operating system and applications. The amount you can
use varies, depending on what hardware you have installed, but can
range from as little as 2GB to as much as 3.5GB. It's usually around
3.1GB.

Note that the hardware is using the address *space*, not the actual
RAM itself. If you have a greater amount of RAM, the rest of the RAM
goes unused because there is no address space to map it to.

Dang. So I can't use it at all for anything.


I heard that I can use the unused memory for other things like a RAM
drive for swap files, %temp%, etc. How do I do that?

Sorry, you heard wrong.

Bummer.
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