Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, Thresher
MaxTheLimit wrote:Only Enterprise and Datacenter versions of Windows Server 2003 can.I've heard folks mention they've managed some tweaking to get it to read the full 4 gigs, but I've yet to see proof. From my understanding it is impossible without 64bit OS.
MaxTheLimit wrote:@FFox - Do you have a link to some reading describing a little bit more about this? All I've been able to find thus far is a site saying that it does support 4 gigs of ram. Do you put much credence into people saying they've been able to go into their BIOS and managed to read 4Gigs of ram in Windows XP 32?
titan wrote:Search is a lost art apparently.<a href="http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50333&highlight=">Talk about kicking...</a>
<a href="http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51058&highlight=">... a dead horse.</a>
Flying Fox wrote:titan wrote:Search is a lost art apparently.<a href="http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50333&highlight=">Talk about kicking...</a>
<a href="http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51058&highlight=">... a dead horse.</a>
MaxTheLimit wrote:Give Dan's article another read. It talks about the remapping feature in a somewhat easier to understand manner. Basically, to maintain compatibility, that hole in the 3GB-4GB range will create a hole in your 4 gigs of physical address space. So to get that back you need to remap the hardware MMIO to even higher up beyond your 4 gigs. That, combined with a 64-OS, will let you see all 4 gigs.Yes I've been looking at these threads a lot lately. Though I was thinking more along the lines of an official tech sheet explaining those whole thing in a slightly more official term. I generally can pick apart the correct and incorrect posts, but to be sure I like to get right to the gritty details. I will be looking to upgrade to upgrade to 4gigs soon and I want to make sure I cover all my bases AND understand why I'm doing what I'm doing by having almost ALL correct information about the subject. As I understand with my 64 bit OS I will still need to enter the BIOS and enable the option. Not too much else will be an issue as I'm not running a 32bit OS. But I'm looking for a little more tech info, and sifting though the posts of people going back and forth can be a little frustrating. Thank you very much for helping BTW.
Nitrodist wrote:Agreed. One time I was looking for that thread but didn't know the title, and so it took me a few searches to find it.If it's any consolation, "Dude, where's my 4GB?" is a very, very inaccurate title that doesn't really mean anything to the average reader trying to find out information about the memory barrier.
MaxTheLimit wrote:I would say incompetence is an easier explanation. Most people don't really know what they are doing.However I see mention for people using standard Windows XP Pro 32bit. Saying simply by enabling memory remapping. They say it shows up as a full 4 gigs. I know this cannot be true. It doesn't work that way for the reasons stated many times over (so I won't go into it). The misinformation is really what gets me. Lying and causing many people to be confused out there just to make it seem like you have accomplished something seems wrong to me. Immoral even.
MaxTheLimit wrote:Hey, at least he will see ~3.2 gigs and will be better than a 2 gig system. Not going to help if he only has one memory hogging application running though.Poor Johnny newb is going to go out with his windows XP and 4 gig kit and be so upset it didn't work. He'll go to the guy that told him it would work. He'll throw his hands up and say "you must have don something wrong".
SuperSpy wrote:Intel tried that with the Pentium Pro (slow running 16-bit instructions) and got bitch slapped. Users of x86/Microsoft computing seem to value backward compatibility more than anything else, compared to say the PPC/Apple (at the time it was PPC) crowd. If Microsoft did that they will be called strongarming and all sorts of bad stuff.If say, Microsoft, in 2004, had said "Our next-gen OS is going to be 64-bit only, you have 3 [lol Longhorn delay] years to comply." We would never be having these conversations. Dell/HP/etc. would have all their machines configured with Vista x64 and, by extension, all the hardware manufacturers (at least those that wanted the juicy contracts with big vendors) would have finally gotten around to actually writing x64 drivers. Then, we wouldn't have to deal with all of this insanity stemming from running 64-bit hardware on a 32-bit OS.
SuperSpy wrote:It works for most applications, but there will be that odd one that uses some undocumented functions and/or installs a driver breaking it.I mean correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the WOW system in Vista x64 totally compatible with existing applications? If so, why not switch?
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