Memory Management

[Guest]

I just got a new workstation, HPxw8400 with 4gb ram, running winXP 32bit pro.
Same configuration on my old HPxw8200. I could see 4gb resident on the old
8200 but I can only see 3gb resident on the new 8400. Any ideas why?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I just got a new workstation, HPxw8400 with 4gb ram, running winXP 32bit pro.
Same configuration on my old HPxw8200. I could see 4gb resident on the old
8200 but I can only see 3gb resident on the new 8400. Any ideas why?

Did you also run 32bit Windows on the old machine, or was it 64bit?

All 32-bit versions of Windows, even though they have a 4GB address
space, can only use *around* 3.1GB of RAM. That's because some of that
space is used by hardware and not available to the operating system
and applications. The amount you can use varies, depending on what
hardware you have installed, but is usually around 3.1GB. But I've
seen numbers as high as 3.5GB.