You might know this, but many do not.  The idea of mentioning it is to reduce/eliminate confusion for folks who see the 'ballpark' figure as being the supposed norm and wondering: "Why the f**k have I got less?"

Ballparking may have its place when counting the crowd at a football game, but in other cases it'd better to be more specific. So in the case of 32 bit OSes, it would be better to say that they can see UP to 4 gb of RAM, depending on the system.  Some may not because the system reserves some for itself: for example, when a graphics card uses shared memory the overall figure will be less.

I know that I'd be pretty pissed if a new employer told me my 'ballpark' salary was going to be $500 per week and my first pay only contained $400.  Yup, Po` is spot on, specifics have their place orright... in some instances, ballpark figures can create more confusion than they eliminate

Eh w/e....

Thats why basically is the point. Im not gonna argue on how i said it lol...

Hehe, who's arguing?

I currently have too much time on my hands, got bored cos I can't get out (mobility issues) and felt like getting lond-winded just to fill in a bit of time.

Actually, I wonder if that's why I can't remember shit these days, I have an aging 32 bit operating system upstairs that can't access all my memory?

Well I had to do a repair install to get my 32bit Vista Ultimate to boot up and, lo-and-behold, looky at what I found....

Yup, that is 8 gb of RAM.... and it is most assuredly a 32bit system.

Why... how come?  Well about a year or so ago I read an article (don't remember where now) on how to get 32 bit Vista to recognise more than 4 gb and tried it.  Although it did not take at the time, I'm wondering if somehow the repair triggered the change so Vista can now utilise the 8 gb installed... if not, it beats me how come

And no, it's not a one-off fluke... several reboots later and it still showing 8 gb, I had to accept it's for real

starkers...Service pack 1 allows Vista to show the additional ram but if you look at your ram in taskmanager you'll see that it is not using all of it.

Personally I would have gone with Linux if I wanted more ram, I am sure Linux systems are so often customized so hard, it probably take more than 20GB+ ram and then get an virtual disk and then install vista (whatever you want) and then run it.

Linux FTW.

Yeah, you're right about task manager only showing 3.75, but Ccleaner and my Winstep CPU monitor both show 8gb. Strange, that!  The other funny thing is that I had SP1 installed prior to doing the startup repair and I recall only 4 gb being shown in the system information panel then, so it's puzzling as to why 8gb is suddenly appearing afterwards.

Oh well, I'm mostly in Vista Home Premium x64 to access the installed RAM anyway, so I'm not gonna lose any sleep pondering it.

Like he said. Your system can "see" the 8GB ... what good is seeing it if it can't use it? I mean i guess thats cool that you got Vista to show it on a full 32bit but ... if it won't use it. Pointless.

That's why I mainly run Vista x64.. it sees and uses the full 8gb. I mainly run Vista 32 bit these days to use my webcam and a few apps that aren't x64 friendly as yet.

I run Vista Ultimate 64 bit as my main OS and run XP Pro and Vista Home Premium 32 bit in Virtual PC for those cases.

I also use Virtual PC sessions for 95% of the web surfing that I do. I really like the added layer of viral protection, I just close out the Virtual PC session without saving the changes.

I will have to look into that!  I mean, my surfing habits are pretty safe and I've not had a virus/infection for years, but you never know about drive-bys and those covert bastards who hack into respectable sites to gain access to users machines.... not to mention the sneaky, drive-by pop-unders that can leave crap everywhere, your registry and etc.

Apart from my AV and firewall, I also use Spybot's constantly updated 'teatimer' to immunise against threats... not to mention AdBlock to prevent unwanted ads and subsequent cookies they can leave.  Sometimes those things can be a right royal pain in the arse to get rid of using conventional methods, which is why I also use BetterPrivacy, a FF add-on that deletes LSO's... long-term cookies that can track users and are normally undeletable using Ccleaner and the like.

I'm still running XP SP3 with 512 MB 2100 DDR RAM and yet to see a BSOD after almost 2 years of uptime...

Great, now I know I will buy a 64bit os next time bcoz 32bit is limited.

Can I run 32bit applications on 64bit windows?

2 years of uptime, huh?

yes, you can run 32 but apps on a 64 bit os. most apps are 32 bit.

Well I do shut it down every night. But yes it has been almost 2 years since I installed XP on this pig.