ram - xp - xp64 - vista help please

[jimmy mumu]

right been looking at pcs in all the variants and was wondering , i've heard windows xp doesnt see more than 2 gig of ram, would it cause problems if i put it on a machine thats already got 4 g installed or would i be better installing xp64 or vista. i've already got ordinary xp and really dont wanna be forking out ££££ for another operating system. cant stand vista but if thats my best bet then so be it. it would be ona a core 2 duo system too. ta

[PhilEnfield]

I'm running a dual boot system with XP Pro and Vista Ultimate, with 4gb Ram

XP Pro/SP2 sees 3.25gb of it and it works fine.
I'm not sure what the official line is, but I can tell you it causes me no problems.

[jimmy mumu]

nice one ta. was hoping to hear something like that.

[PhilEnfield]

I have a recollection of a tweak requ'd to the boot.ini file, to make XP use all of the 3gb.

I cant quite remember it now, but I'm sure someone else will know and post ... it's a long time ago now that I did it ;)

[duffy90210]

I think this may be it
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316739/EN-US/

XP by default can see anything between 3.00 to 3.50GB depend on hardware used, anything above will just go blind, some said having 4GB will slow down XP by a small margin, if its that small, then I havent noticed. but as most machines I use are critical, I play safe and use 3GB max on each to avoid any unforeseen problems.

Sadly XP64 is not that great, except the larger memory addressing, and Vista 64 is a no go, even though its really stable now with SP1, I just hated that stupid and longwinded interface.