Nov 10 2008

When Does 4 Equal 3.5?

Category: Personal — ChrisM @ 5:19 am

I was reading up on Windows Vista the other day (Ira’s laptop had it installed when we bought it last year), and I was surprised to find out that even with Service Pack 1 installed, 32-bit flavours of Windows Vista can only address up to 4Gb of memory. SP1 means that the amount of system memory is now correctly reported, but the amount of available RAM is unchanged. Because of the 4Gb limit including your graphics card’s memory and the other addresses used on your motherboard, you are not likely to be able to use much more than 3.25-3.5Gb, no matter what RAM you physically install, unless you move up to 64-bit flavours!

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2 Responses to “When Does 4 Equal 3.5?”

  1. Dan (The other Dan) says:
    November 13th, 2008 6:07 pm

    Not a problem I think for the average user. If you push the PC to the limits of it’s RAM (probably like your good self) then you’ll notice the lowered performance I guess. Also I always thought that it was a limit of the CPU itself (e.g. 16/32 bit processor) to access a certain of memory (memory addresses) and not the OS, but what do I know 🙂

    On a slightly different subject, after you came over and I realised my hard drive and external USB disk were nearly full, I looked inside the PC to see how easy it would be to add another hard disk. (easy I think) – I noticed that there was no ribbon cable connecting primary and slave devices. Insead there was a sealed thinner purple cable connecting HD to motherboard !!!!! when did PCs change from the good ol ribbon cable, or is this the point you tell me it happened it happened about five years ago (shows how long its been since I looked inside one I guess, hardware was never really my thing !!!!!)

  2. ChrisM says:
    November 14th, 2008 12:50 am

    re. 1st paragraph, I’d agreed with XP, however Vista really does use a lot more resources just booting to a desktop… with CPU vs. OS, the OS does play a large role, as you can have more than 4Gb in some flavours of 32-bit Linux, and 32-bit flavours of Business Windows (Server) I believe.

    Dead easy to add another hard drive, definitely. A thinner cable is most likely a SATA cable (as opposed to the older PATA ribbon ones), although there is a minute chance that it is a PATA cable that has been pre-modded to improve air flow in the case (I have them in my case). The concept of SATA has been around since 2000, but last 3-4 years (I guess) saw a huge increase in SATA drives/cnotrollers being used.