is it true windows xp can only use 3gb of ram

by chancselord Jul 19, 2007 2:59PM PDT

I have a user with a dell precision 690 and xeon processor with 4gb of ram and windows xp 32bit OS. the bios shows all of the ram but it doesnt show in windows can anyone help or at least tell me why.

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Windows XP RAM

by jpvlovesyou Jul 19, 2007 3:26PM PDT

Can you give us some details on the system? I also found this article on RAM and Windows:

http://www.geek.com/windows-xp-maximum-memory/

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Accessible RAM

by El Alquimista Jul 19, 2007 4:29PM PDT

Windows 32 has a 32-bit address bus, which is, indeed, 4 GB. But it is not all available for RAM addressing. There are a number of other things that share the bus -- ROM, PCI cards, network connectors, possibly the video, and more. The net result is that, depending on the system and its configuration, only about 3 to 3.5 GB is available for addressing RAM. See this link for more information.

Hope this helps a little

Frank

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Depends on version.

by Kees Bakker Jul 19, 2007 8:50PM PDT

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/default.mspx tells about the 64bit version of Windows XP. Of course, you don't need for normal home and small office use (1 Gb is enough for 95% of the users). But it might be beneficial for certain very specific tasks.

Kees

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RAM

by pcwiz100 Jul 20, 2007 5:00AM PDT

Hi,

My system is a Pentium D 830 3GHz with 1GB of RAM. I ran the Crucial System Scanner (http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/) to scan how much RAM I could add. There were performance charts for how much adding RAM would increase system performance. The scanner just recommended 3GB of RAM for maximum performance even though my motherboard supports 8GB of RAM.

What I think is that XP does support up to 4GB of RAM adding it won't make a whole lot of a performance increase over 3GB of RAM.

is it true windows xp can only use 3gb of ram

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