On 8 Sep 2007 at 13:33, Mark Rode wrote:

> Your statement is still wrong. This has been extensively tested, and 
> written about in Maximum PC in the last two years. 2GB is the sweet 
> spot for RAM in XP PRO, as far as performance is concerned, so when 
> Maximum PC builds their annual God Box they stay with 2GB for 
> machines running XP PRO. Their tests have shown that above 2GB 
> gaming, and normal use shows very little improvement in performance.
> 
> However, XP PRO will support 3.25 GB RAM, and without doing anything 
> to the boot.ini file.
> I am running 4GB of RAM in XP PRO SP2 on a dual 3.06 Xeon Workstation.
> 
> Windows reports the use of 4GB of RAM in System information, but in 
> both Task Manager, and >>control panel>> System, it shows 3.25 GB of RAM.

  You're comparing apples and oranges.

  The text he quoted referred to a 2GB maximum VIRTUAL address space per 
process, unless the /3GB flag is used.

  The other numbers -- 3.25GB, 4GB, 16GB and so on -- all refer to the total 
amount of PHYSICAL RAM installed int the box.  4GB is a hard physical limit 
for a 32-bit CPU (or 64-bit CU running in 32-bit mode) without external 
memory-management hardware and OS support for it.

David Gillett

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