Win 7 and memory

[Sinnister]

Hello,
I've been told that windows limits any single application from only using a maximum of 2Gb of ram. Is this true and if so can it be changed?

 

[mindless728]

that is a limit of 32bit windows operating systems (64bit have a much higher limit)

 

[EricLegge]

No, that is not true.

The 32-bit version of Windows XP and the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 can only use a maximum of 3.5GB of RAM memory because 32-bits can on address that cessing memorymany memory addresses, but the 64-bit versions (Windows XP Pro is the only version of XP that has a 64-bit version) can address up to 128GB of memory.

When Windows runs out of memory, it uses its paging swap file located on the hard disk drive. Accessing a disk space is much slower than accessing memory, so the system slows down if the paging file has to be used.

Read this page on RAM memory for all of the information on it - http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/RAM.htm

 

[mindless728]

No, that is not true.

The 32-bit version of Windows XP and the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 can only use a maximum of 3.5GB of RAM memory because 32-bits can on address that cessing memorymany memory addresses, but the 64-bit versions (Windows XP Pro is the only version of XP that has a 64-bit version) can address up to 128GB of memory.

When Windows runs out of memory, it uses its paging swap file located on the hard disk drive. Accessing a disk space is much slower than accessing memory, so the system slows down if the paging file has to be used.

Read this page on RAM memory for all of the information on it - http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/RAM.htm

look into it sometime, the 32bit address space is split into halves, one for kernel memory and the other for user, this means that 2GB of ram can be allocated in user space for each process and the other 2GB of the address is only for kernel memory (what the OP is talking about)

though the max amount of memory that shows up in 32bit windows varies depending on hardware and is normally around 3GB ( what you are talking about)

 

[ricno]

No, that is not true.

The 32-bit version of Windows XP and the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 can only use a maximum of 3.5GB of RAM memory

There is a difference between the "virtual memory address space" that each process gets from the operating system and the total amount of physical memory the OS can address.

Each process gets only 2GB (however, under certain conditions 3GB can be used), but in fact a 32 bits operating system can actually address up to 64 GB of physical RAM. The address space is actually 36 bits, but is logically disabled in many operating systems, for example XP, but is available in for example Windows 2003 Enterprise.

So, a typical 32-bit process can only address 2 GB of RAM and that can not be changed.

 

[EricLegge]

I don't know if that is true or not but these are the facts and recommendations on Crucial.com:

Computer memory requirements: How much memory do you need? -

http://www.crucial.com/support/howmuch.aspx