Windows XP 4gb maximum ram

[nexigen]

Sort of revisiting an old topic here. I have 8gb's of RAM installed and of course task manager says 3gb. I've searched and discovered the reason is due to windows xp 32-bit. Obviously I can upgrade to windows 7 64-bit but I still wanted to wait a while before that. So are there any new/reliable work-arounds I could do to utilize the full amount? Any help is appreciated.

 

[mavroxur]

It's due to the available address space in 32-bit WinXP. There are no work-arounds for this.




*EDIT*
And before some smarty-pants adds this, i know that /PAE used to allow >4GB, however, MS removed this since SP2. Pre-SP2 installs would allow it, but who runs XP SP0/1 any more? And yes, it worked, and yes, it had several compatability issues when running >4gb due to drivers not being written with PAE in mind.

 

[nexigen]

I've heard of other programs that would use the extra ram as though it was a hard drive for page filing, I'm not sure how reliable this is though, let alone if they even work to begin with.

 

[mavroxur]

If the OS can't access the RAM, the programs running in it won't be able to either.

 

[T_T]

I've heard of other programs that would use the extra ram as though it was a hard drive for page filing, I'm not sure how reliable this is though, let alone if they even work to begin with.

You may be referring to some flash drives being able to use a partition of the storage space on said flash drive as sort of a buffer that acts like RAM. Some flash drives have this option. This is called Ready Boost.

 

[doive1231]

There a Tom's article explaining how to use the extra RAM as a swapfile instead of your hard disk, which is obviously faster. Check it out as I haven't done it myself.

 

[nexigen]

That's exactly what I was referring to, using it as a swapfile! Does anyone know how reliable this is? Thanks Doive.