Is the 3 gig switch safe on windows xp home edition

[shinobi_13]

Hello,
I a dell dimension e510 with win xp home edition,i been doing a lot of research on the memory issues on win xp and every were i read i seen that win xp should see 3gigs to 3.2gigs of memory with out the 3gig switch installed if you have 4gigs of memory installed.I have 4gigs of total memory installed on my dell and my bios and system info says 4gigs of memory but windows xp says 2gigs not 3 or 3.2gigs any reason why ? thanks

 

[treefrog07]

It is likely you have a GPU with memory and some memory in the CPU cache. The memory issue involves the 32-bit Windows OSes, where those OSes can see and use about 3.5GB of total memory: RAM + GPU memory + CPU cache memory. The 32-bit Windows OSes do not have coding to support more memory - MS did not anticipate such large amounts on memory back in 2001-02 when XP was released.

The 64-bit Windows OSes can see and read much more memory.