XP Home: more than 256kRAM a waste?

[MIke Smith]

Quick question: I was going to upgrade my RAM from 512k to
1gb on my XP Home machine and a friend claims that
anything more than 256kRAM is a waste because XP Home can
only use 256kRAM. He says I'll have to upgrade to XP Pro
to use any more RAM. Is that true?

I'd heard that all flavors of XP can address up to 4 GB of
RAM. Is there a limit on the max RAM that XP Home will
allocate for a single program? That is, if I only have one
program open, will XP Home only use a certain amout of
RAM, or would it use all of it if I had, say, 1gb?

Follow-up question: Is there any advantages to upgrading
to XP Pro if I had 1gb RAM?

 

[Mike Mulligan]

Your friend is wrong. There is no such limit in Windows XP.

XP Pro and XP Home manage memory equally well, so there is no reason to
prefer XP Pro just because you want to install 1 GB of RAM.

Mike Mulligan

 

[Randall Arnold]

Your friend is mistaken. I have been running XP for a year now, and saw
first-hand that it took advantage of an upgrade from 256M to 512m and
finally to 1 gig. Visio went from crashing at the lower numbers (on a very
large file) to smooth sailing at 1 gig. If the OS couldn't see it, Visio
wouldn't, either.

Randall Arnold

 

[Ralf Baumhoefer]

simple question, simple answer: Get a new friend !

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

Ask your friend to substantiate his claim with some solid
technical documentation. He's quite wrong.

Bruce Chambers

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[Chris Barnes]

Quick question: I was going to upgrade my RAM from 512k to
1gb on my XP Home machine and a friend claims that
anything more than 256kRAM is a waste because XP Home can
only use 256kRAM. He says I'll have to upgrade to XP Pro
to use any more RAM. Is that true?

I hope you don't have enemies, because your friend is bad enough as it
is.

In short, he doesn't know what he's talking about.