4gb ram

Ive heard about the 32bit restrictions on RAM and have just purchased a 4gb laptop that comes with 32bit Vista. I know this may annoying as it has probably been discussed many times. However, i would still like to ask whether 32bit compatible only applications could take advantage of the 4gb ram in a 64bith OS. For Example, say i was using Vista x64, and i multitasked 20 programs that were all 32-bit, are they able to use the full 4gb of memory?

 

im not expert on this, but I dont think you will get the full 4gb.

 

some good inputs here
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=137053

cheers ...

 

Each individual 32 bit will not be able to address any more memory under a 64 bit OS than it could under a 32 bit OS. The app itself is still 32 bit. However, collectively the 20 programs in your scenario would be utiizing all 4 gb.

Gary

 

The short answer is "no" because, unless you change the memory management configuration, half of that 4GB (i.e., 2GB) will be reserved for use by the operating system's kernel, leaving only 2GB (at most) for use by applications. There's a basic discussion of _Vista memory management here.

That being said, under a 32-bit WindowsOS, each process has a maximum virtual memory space of 4GB (under the 64-bit OSes, that goes up to 8 TB), as discussed, somewhat opaquely, in this MSDN article.

Thus, running 32-bit legacy applications under a 64-bit version of _Vista should not present any problems.

 

A 32bit system will only recognize 3.2-3.6 GB depending on the laptop. If you switch to 64 bit (Which I highly recommend) then you will be able to use the full 4GBs. You could even use more than 4GB if you want to as long as your laptop and motherboard/BIOS supports it.

 

I would be very careful with recommending 64 Bit Windows on a laptop with 4GB of RAM - its not that the "unused" GB on a 4GB 32 Bit OS is wasted - it is, for example utilized by the graphics card.

A 64 Bit OS only makes sense if you
a) have a specific need for it (this will change in the next months/year step by step)
b) more crucially: If you have hardware that can actually fully use it to its advantage, meaning also 8GB or more of RAM.

A 64 Bit OS was reported to be slightly faster by members - but unless oyu need it, its not really worth the hassle at the moment as a few manufacturers will only supply 32 Bit drivers.
Then some software wont work (e.g. SAS)

 

Another point - keep in mind that your ability to utilize physical RAM will also be limited by the size of the chipset's logical address space, which is the universe of addresses the system has available to assign to anything and everything that it needs to address, including most importantly the GPU. Notebook systems are just now beginning to get chipsets that have a logical address space greater than 4GB, so it's likely that your notebook has a logical address space that's limited to 4GB and, as a result, since at least some of those addresses have to be allocated to other things, you will almost never be able to address the full 4GB of physical RAM.

 

quick slightly off topic question here....

I have 4gb ram, running 32bit vista.

I have both a X4500 and 9300m GS graphic card that I can switch between the two whenever I want...

Does the X4500 utilize the full 1gb that's leftover from the 3gb that's taken up by windows? What about the 9300m GS even though it had its own GDDR3 256mb built-in?

 

This discussion is ? Well in some ways obscure to say the least.

OP asked a question of the applications ability to make use of 4GB RAM? Well what app makes use of 4GB's?

I think this falls into the category of if you have to ask you don't need. Also not certain the responses correctly differentiated between OS and apps? Yes I know in theory but read previous sentence.

To OP are you working with a DATA base? Windows apps makes 0 diff.

 

I recommend to run a game that can display this - I think a control panel told me the NVidia on my Vaio was using 100od MB or so - but in Empire Earth (didn't run well for some reason) the game told me the graphics card had more than 1GB

I'm not sure how much exactly the graphics card can utilize, but I'm pretty sure its way more than 500MB