4GB Ram Support

[Guest]

Does anyone know out there which windows O.S. supports 4GB of ram. I have
just put in 4Gb of ram in my system, and it will not boot up. I am running
XP Home Edition

 

[Jerry]

Do a Google search on boot.ini switches and you'll find many articles
concerning XP and 4Gb of RAM.

 

[Guest]

I will try that Jerry.

 

[Johnathan]

Does anyone know out there which windows O.S. supports 4GB of ram. I
have just put in 4Gb of ram in my system, and it will not boot up. I
am running XP Home Edition

Maybe your MOBO does not support 4Gigs.

 

[Guest]

the MOBO does support 4Gigs

 

[Ron Martell]

Does anyone know out there which windows O.S. supports 4GB of ram. I have
just put in 4Gb of ram in my system, and it will not boot up. I am running
XP Home Edition

Please provide some more detailed information regarding "will not boot
up".

Is there an error message of any kind? If so then the verbatim text
of that message will provide a direct clue as to the underlying cause
of the problem.

Will the computer boot into Safe Mode or into Last Known Good
Configuration?


The more information you can provide about this behavior the more
likely it is that someone will be able to help you.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[frodo]

SOME mobo's / chipsets that CLAIM to support 4 GB of RAM really don't; a
small amount of the address space is set aside for special purposes.
Here's a fragment from a FAQ re: Intel 865/875 chipset mobo's:

The maximum DDR memory i875/i865 chipset boards support is 3.64G rather
than 4GB. This limitation is caused by PC architecture and the missing
0.36G memory address is reserved for PCI I/O space, AGP aperture mapping
space and other onboard device I/O space. Thus, i875/i865 datasheet claims
that the memory support is up to 4GB, but actually the system only uses up
to 3.64GB with four 1G DDR memories installed. In other words, BIOS and
the operation system will report to 3.64GB only.

 

[Tim Slattery]

Does anyone know out there which windows O.S. supports 4GB of ram. I have
just put in 4Gb of ram in my system, and it will not boot up. I am running
XP Home Edition

XP - Home or Pro - should certainly boot up when you have 4GB RAM
installed, depending, of course, of whether your motherboard actually
supports that much RAM, and whether everything else is working
correctly.

You will not be able to see all 4GB though. Some part of the 4GB
address space for physical memory will be mapped to video RAM, and
registers and resources in your other peripheral gear.

 

[Guest]

I have also run into this problem. I am using an ASUS A8N-SLI MOBO, latest
rev of Bios (1009) and an AMD 64 3700+ CPU. OS is WinXP Pro, Sp2 (32bit).
BIOS reports 4096MB of RAM available, but Windows only "sees" 2 GB
(exactly). Memory is good, and I tried the /3GB switch in the Boot.ini, with
no noticable change.

Any suggestions?

Richie

 

[Tim Slattery]

I have also run into this problem. I am using an ASUS A8N-SLI MOBO, latest
rev of Bios (1009) and an AMD 64 3700+ CPU. OS is WinXP Pro, Sp2 (32bit).
BIOS reports 4096MB of RAM available, but Windows only "sees" 2 GB
(exactly). Memory is good, and I tried the /3GB switch in the Boot.ini, with
no noticable change.

As I said yesterday in a different thread, the /3GB switch has nothing
to do with physical RAM.

WinXP has a 4GB address space, which is used to address system RAM,
video RAM, and other registers and resources on expansion boards. So
if you have 4GB of physical RAM and 128MB on your video board, you
won't be able to use 128MB of your system RAM. But no video board
(that I know of, anyway) is going to have 2GB of memory!

Are you using some of your RAM for a RAM disk? Anything else that
might be sucking memory off the top before XP gets to it?

 

[frodo]

common issue - and it's "normal". Google around.

you SHOULD see more tham just 2.0 GB tho, typically somewhere around 2.75
w/ an SLI configuration, 3.0 w/ just 1 video card.

Things you can do: in bios, be sure all shadowing is OFF, unneccessary HW
is disabled (turn off firewire if you don't use it, etc), and AGP Apature
is set "correctly" (SLI shouldn't even offer this option tho!).

Bottom line: you won't ever get the full 4GB, unless you go to XP 64-bit
edition.

ASk in the ASUS formum, their members have dealt w/ this before...