Gladiator Security Forum > Is there a Max memory limit for WinXP?

Full Version: Is there a Max memory limit for WinXP?

Gladiator Security Forum > Microsoft Corner > Help & Support and information: MS Windows

stidyup

Jan 27 2006, 10:10 AM

This is related to another question on a different forum but it's got me thinking. Is there a maximum memory limit in WinXP? I know a 32bit CPU has a max memory limit of 3gb, but does WinXP 32 bit version have the same limit? What would happen if you installed WinXP (non 64 bit version) on a PC with over 3gb of memory would it work?

So far I've been unable to find the magic words for a google search.

Hunter

Jan 27 2006, 10:45 AM

Windows XP Pro and Home both are designed to support up to 4 gb of RAM, although motherboards and RAM modules to handle this much RAM are not yet widely available.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q304297/

Windows 98 & Me both support well in excess of 512 mb RAM and there are a large number of people who regularly use these versions of Windows with as much as 1.5 gb of RAM installed and make effective use of all of it.

There's a bit of difference between effective management and performance
inprovement. 512MB will give you about as much performance as you're going to
get for normal operations but if you use applications which require hundreds of
MBs of RAM then XP will manage the memory load up to 4GB without any problems.

The 64-bit edition of WinXP can handle something like 128GB of RAM.

"All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit
Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going
from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is
actually installed on the computer."

RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555223/

also caution on hiberation if over 1 gb

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.p...17fa301beea4c1e

stidyup

Jan 27 2006, 11:39 AM

thanks :)

Mosaic1

Jan 29 2006, 06:37 PM

In addition to the hibernation information Hunter supplied..

If you use a lot of RAM you might consider turning off the Hibernate feature. I worked on a thread a while back where the guy had 1 gig of RAM and a small Hard Drive with very little free space left. He was dangerously low.

hiberfil.sys was 1 gig in size.

Excerpted from:

http://www.softwarepatch.com/tips/hiberfil-sys-xp.html

QUOTE

so what is the hiberfil.sys file and why is it so big? Hibernation takes everything in memory and writes it to your hard drive as the hiberfil.sys file. If you have 512MB of memory, then hiberfil.sys will be about 512MB. If you have 1GB, the file will be around 1GB. The important point to remember is that even if you don't use hibernation, hiberfil.sys will still take up this huge amount of disk space. The way to remove the file is to turn off the hibernation feature (by default, hibernate is activated automatically when XP is installed). Here's how to do it:

Click the link to read more. This has some other Ramifications. LOL No pun intended.

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