Win XP home with 4GB of RAM?

[Guest]

I added 2 more GB of ram to my machine for a total of 4GB, because I wanted
to use a rather large ramdrive to take of some load from harddrives, not to
mantion the speed increase I would get.
When I booted the machine up memory test shows the correct amount, 4GB. But
in windows Taskmanager only 3 GB of ram is shown. ( I don't have english
language windows so I don't know the actual tab name but it's the same tab
with processor usage and pagefile info)
Before I bought the memoryupgrade I was lead to believe XP home supports max
4GB of memory, was I lied to? Where is the missing one gigabyte?

 

[Ron Martell]

I added 2 more GB of ram to my machine for a total of 4GB, because I wanted
to use a rather large ramdrive to take of some load from harddrives, not to
mantion the speed increase I would get.
When I booted the machine up memory test shows the correct amount, 4GB. But
in windows Taskmanager only 3 GB of ram is shown. ( I don't have english
language windows so I don't know the actual tab name but it's the same tab
with processor usage and pagefile info)
Before I bought the memoryupgrade I was lead to believe XP home supports max
4GB of memory, was I lied to? Where is the missing one gigabyte?

Windows XP will not properly report the amount of installed RAM if
there is more than 3 gb total installed. This is a cosmetic issue
only and all of the physical RAM is in fact usable.

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."

 

[Guest]

Windows XP will not properly report the amount of installed RAM if

there is more than 3 gb total installed. This is a cosmetic issue
only and all of the physical RAM is in fact usable.

Thank you for reply, it however seems that it's not so simple.
Taskmanager shows 3GB of total ram, of which 2.6 is free (0.4 for windows
and web browser)
Now the program I use, RamDisk Plus is unable to create a larger than 2.6 GB
ramdisk, which is the value of free ram shown on taskmanager. This is of
course undestandable, but for the missing one GB... So either Ramdisk Plus
can't see beyond the "cosmetic issue" or windows reserves the one gigabyte
for some purpose so it's unable to be used.

 

[Jerry]

Do a Google search on boot.ini and you'll find articles describing the /3Gb
switch and other info on what happens when there is more than 3Gb of memory
installed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I added 2 more GB of ram to my machine for a total of 4GB, because I wanted
to use a rather large ramdrive to take of some load from harddrives, not to
mantion the speed increase I would get.
When I booted the machine up memory test shows the correct amount, 4GB. But
in windows Taskmanager only 3 GB of ram is shown. ( I don't have english
language windows so I don't know the actual tab name but it's the same tab
with processor usage and pagefile info)
Before I bought the memoryupgrade I was lead to believe XP home supports max
4GB of memory, was I lied to? Where is the missing one gigabyte?

Normal behavior, no bug. The rest of the memory is there but unusable
due to memory mapping limitations. The amount lost due to memory
mapping varies depending on your hardware configuration.

My laptop maxes out at 2.8 even though the board has 3.0. I've seen
another machine max out at 2.7 but I'm hoping to install the 64-bit
version of XP and recover the rest of the memory.