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>Do I need Vista 64 bit to use 4GB ram? Will XP work?
>Richard F. Bolha


First, your motherboard has to support the type, and amount of RAM 
you have installed. If you have 4GB of RAM installed, and the 
motherboard sees it as 4GB of RAM during POST, then 4GB is available 
to the Operating System.

With 4GB of RAM, Windows XP will show anywhere from 3 to 3.4 GB 
installed. This has to do with available memory addressing. You can 
look in Control Panel>> System Properties to see how much Windows 
will identify on your particular machine.

However, if you look under the windows system info utility you may 
see 4GB of RAM.  In the last year, MS has come out, and said that 
even though XP doesn't show more then 3-3.4GB of RAM, and even though 
it can not use more then 3GB+ for applications, it does use the extra 
RAM for things like drivers.

To make this even more confusing Maximum PC has done extensive XP PRO 
testing and determined that there is very little, if any, performance 
improvement above 2GB of RAM in XP PRO.

All this would matter if RAM was $1.50 a megabyte like it was a 
decade ago. But since you can buy yourself 2GB of DDR or DDR2 for 
well under 200 dollars it has become a moot point. Conventional 
wisdom is to install 4GB of RAM in XP PRO if your motherboard 
supports it, and let XP PRO use what it will.

After beating up on Vista 32 for the last two years, the tech head, 
and the computer journalist community ,are gradually exhibiting a 
resigned acceptance of Vista 64. It is not uncommon to see these 
groups building high end PCs running Vista 64, with 8GB of ram. With 
the right hardware it is very stable, and quick. This again is the 
result of very, very inexpensive DDR2 RAM. I myself am planning a new 
build, for a video editing box, based around a 3GHZ Quadcore 
processor using 8 GB of quality Cosair DDR2 which I bought six months 
ago for around $160.

There is one compelling reason to install Vista64, and that is 
because it will use up to many terabytes of RAM in a worthwhile way. 
Vista64 has a way of learning what programs you like to use, and then 
caching them in memory for extremely quick loading times, and performance.

Vista64 has come a long way but still has issues with drivers, and 
applications. However, lots of manufacturers provide drivers for it 
now, and if you have a new build, with all new mainstream components, 
and peripherals, and you don't expect to run a lot of legacy 
software, then you probably won't have a problem installing or running Vista64.

Vista64, usually, has no problems running 32 bit applications, but 
there are some it won't run. It will not, however, run ANY 16 bit 
programs or 32 bit applications with 16 bit code attached. 16 bit 
software was being developed back in the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 days.

  I myself, still use a few 16 bit software. Good software, that does 
the job is still good software. I use the original version of 
Chessmaster 3000 on a daily bases as well as a number of single 
purpose utilities written in 16 bit code.

There is a solution to running old apps under Vista64. Just run them 
in a Virtual Machine running XP PRO32. Modern hardware, with lots of 
RAM can easily run VMs under VISTA 64 and experience no performance 
loss, except of course, graphic intensive games which can be 
accommodated by multi boot machine running Vista64 and XPPRO32.

Vista 64 is still a OS for tech heads who don't mind running a 
esoteric setup in exchange for significant performance gain. 64 bit 
is definitely the future, and more and more machines are being 
manufactured, and sold as 64 bit PCs. I have seen a number of high 
end laptops recently that come equipped with Vista64 as the default OS.

Of course if you now have a laptop with a 64 bit CPU that isn't 
specifically set up with drivers for Vista64 ....then it isn't going 
to run VISTA64. But no worries, 32 bit OSs are, and will be, the 
mainstream for quite a while yet.

Good Luck!

Mark Rode
The Nospin Group




At 05:29 AM 8/23/2008, you wrote:
>With the 32 bit system you can install (as a rule) the full 4GB or 
>ram and it will run, but it will only use about 3GB of the ram.
>Don't even think about using the 64 bit o.s. just to use the 
>additional GB of ram!!  Not all software will run under the 64 bit

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>Do I need Vista 64 bit to use 4GB ram? Will XP work?
>Richard F. Bolha

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