Vista RAM Question.

IamMetaldave

Hey Folks,

I know there's millions of Vista threads but I haven't seen this here.

I just (today) bumped my RAM up to 4GB, I found a good deal going and thought, why not?!

The thing is though, when I had 2GB of RAM Vista sat idol in around 800MB-1GB, now that I have upped my RAM to 4GB, it sits in a steady 1.4GB.

What's that all about?? Does it mean the more RAM you make available to Vista, the more it'll eat up??

Any ideas?

Barlow07

I bumped mine up to 2G myself, but i did read at the time that Vista should have no more the 3.5G which i though was &%$£, just make sure you have the 2x 2G inserted correctly.

Capt'n Midnight

Dave Eyesclosed wrote:

What's that all about?? Does it mean the more RAM you make available to Vista, the more it'll eat up??

If you have no programs using the memory, then Vista will use it, and release it back to you programs when they ask for it.

The question could be not why is Vista using so much memory but why didn't previous versions not use memory when it was available.

IamMetaldave

Barlow07 wrote: »

I bumped mine up to 2G myself, but i did read at the time that Vista should have no more the 3.5G which i though was &%$£, just make sure you have the 2x 2G inserted correctly.

I read the 64bit version takes up to 128GB!

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If you have no programs using the memory, then Vista will use it, and release it back to you programs when they ask for it.

The question could be not why is Vista using so much memory but why didn't previous versions not use memory when it was available.

I actually read that after I posted.

I wasn't complaining about it, really.. Just wondering.

Stephen

The three-and-a-half or so gig limit is a limitation in any 32-bit system. 32 bits can only address a maximum of 4GB. The other 500 or so megabytes of address space is used by things like your graphics card's memory. 64 bit systems can theoretically address up to 16 exabytes of memory :eek:
That said, most 64 bit operating systems don't support that much memory - you're right in saying that Vista x64 supports up to 128GB. But only in versions higher than home premium! That only supports up to 16GB, and home basic 8GB. I can see those limits becoming problems in a couple of years.

IamMetaldave

RAM prices would want to keep falling so

I've a 64bit Ultimate and my board will take up to 8GB, I can't see myself needing more anytime soon.. I hope

Capt'n Midnight

64KB in the BBC micro but a pair of 16KB roms and 3 KB used by the OS meant you ran out of memory very very quick when you used the "hi res" video mode that took another 20KB

Same thing happens to the first 1024 KB of RAM too - 384KB usually missing / unusable without tweaking, back in the early days this was a real issue, programs just didn't run till you freed up memory.

Now the same thing is happening again because of a hareware limit from the motherboard / BIOS combined with OS limitations. it would cost more to have a motherboard with extra memory slots than than it would to buy the full 4GB and have some of it not used.

Well there used to be ways to let 32-bit systems use more than 3-3.5GB of RAM thanks to 36-bit PAE mode but XP SP2 dropped support for it. This was taken from a test rig I built up to prove what I had always suspected.

Capt'n Midnight

Karsini wrote: »

Well there used to be ways to let 32-bit systems use more than 3-3.5GB of RAM

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

Windows 2000 Memory Support. With Windows 2000 Professional and Server, the maximum amount of memory that can be supported is 4 GB (identical to Windows NT 4.0, as described later in this section). However, Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports 8 GB of physical RAM and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server supports 32 GB of physical RAM using the PAE feature of the IA-32 processor family, beginning with Intel Pentium Pro and later.

http://blogs.msdn.com/carmencr/archive/2004/08/06/210093.aspx

Stephen

They still allow that in Server 2003.