My Physical Address Extension Problem!

[ReadyMan2009]

Hey,
I have a question for someone with a knowledge in the Physical Address Extension unit of Windows XP Media Center 2005.

I have that O/S, I have 4GB of RAM(2GB DDR2 533 MHz, and 2 GB DDR2 667 MHz) installed...

And when I look under my system settings through the Control Panel, and on systemrequirementslab.com, it says it only reads 3 GB of RAM, but in my BIOS it reads 1024 MB per DIMM.

Why is this O/S not reading my other GB of RAM?

As far as I know, XP Media Center 05' the only 32Bit XP O/S that reads up to 4 GB of RAM, every other one only read up to 3 GB, is that true? I could be wrong, but my instructors say otherwise.

But if someone could inform me on why my XP Media Center-05' is not reading my other 1 GB stick of RAM when my BIOS does, and how to make Windows recognize it, that would be appreciated

And if I installed Vista x86 Home Basic, would it read that other GB of RAM? Is it a memory allocation problem? Is it a software problem? I am stumped...

Thanks

 

[ReadyMan2009]

I forgot to mention that I have a DELL XPS 400, 4GB of RAM(2GB DDR2 533 MHz, 2GB DDR2 667 MHz) and an Nvidia 9800 GX2 1GB DDR3( but I am currently using my Nvidia 8500GT 512MB DDR2...)
And an Intel Pentium D 2.80 GHz Dual Core CPU..

Any help is ,much appreciated

 

[bc4]

Long story short --- Read the stickies on the memory forum

shorter answer --- XP media center '05 is the same as any other Microsoft 32 bit os in this regard.

 

[bc4]

Wow, forgot how bad the search engine is for Tom's --- this thread here does pretty well on explaining it

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/237236-45-recognise-ddr2

 

[ReadyMan2009]

@bc4-

Thanks, that answers my question on the 05' M.C XPx86 issue,
Yeah I thought my instrucor uses it for in class demos, and his displays on his prjector on the whiteboard, and shows us everything and he showed us about virtual memory and bal bla bla, but I did ask him to show me how to make it recognize the 4 GB of RAM, and explained my at-home situation, and he said that it was Vistax64 Media Center He was using not the XP 05' edition(I havent even looked at the media center on this O/S, but I still felt stupid)

Any ways THX for the info, and your help was apprecitaed

 

[chimera15]

Pretty interesting. I was looking up what PAE was, and found this, because I'm using xp tablet. Tablet is a subset of xp media edition, and I'm using it on a newer gateway c142xl that originally came with Vista that I downgraded and just boosted it from 3gb of ram to 4gb. It popped up a little statement under the system stats, saying 3.25 gb of Ram, Physical Address Extension. I have 3 other systems running xp 32 bit with 4gb for gaming, and never saw that before.

Anyway, interesting info about media edition handling this function different than normal xp pro, I think it probably does somewhat, but the 4gb-(graphic card memory and other stuff) is probably still true, thus 3.25 gb.