Quote:
Originally Posted by scoliosis
If you have either 64 bit processor (A64 or EM64) PAE is enabled by default and will allow addressing 4GB of memory address space (notice I didn't say RAM, just memory address space). If you don't have it, you have to force enable PAE and that execute protection feature thingamy to enable 4GB memory address space.
Now that's out of the way -
XP SP2 onwards, no matter what you do, you only see 2GB of available RAM to your applications. That's MSFT's doing, they hard coded the kernel to do that so that users won't run into issues with badly written drivers. PAE enabled systems requires double pointers (or was it double address jumps, I can't remember for sure) to do DMA, but a lot of driver writers cheat and just assumes no one has more than 2GB of RAM and that all the addresses are strictly <2GB.
On my system with 4GB of system RAM, I see 2GB in XP and 3.4GB in Vista32.
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i see 3GB of ram in task manager on xp pro sp2
