Hi,

I'm planning on putting together an athlon 64 system when I get my tax
return and I'm looking for a good motherboard that will accept 3GB or ram
(or more). I know windows doesn't really allow a program to accessmore than
2GB of ram, but I hear XP pro can access more with certain setup. Either
way, I use a program that will use all 2GB of ram allowed it, so having 3GB
will allow windows to load all of it's bloat outside of that 2GB program
limit. Does that make any sense?

Ok, my real question... I have found motherboards that claim they alow 3GB
of ram, but I've also read that some will not allow you to actually use 3GB
of ram? If they can't use 3GB of ram, why would they allow you to install
3GB? This makes no sense to me.

What I am looking for is a board that supports the Athlon 64 3400, Sata,
onboard Lan, usb 2.0, Firewire, 6 channel sound, etc. Basically all the
bells and whistles. This whole 3GB thing has me a bit confused.

Thanks for any help. Hope this made sense.

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004 03:40:41 GMT, "Mr. E. Mann" <Mreman (AT) yahoo (DOT) com>
wrote:

I cannot help with most of your questions, but I know that Windows 98
runs into problems when more than 512 MB of memory is fitted.

I have 768 MB fitted. I have set Win 98 to only use 700 MB. It works
well when re-booted, but after a while I get the symptom of not being
able to open a DOS prompt window.


Like you, I believe that Windows XP can handle more memory, but cannot
quote specifics.
--
Arthur.

Mr. E. Mann wrote:
If there are 3 slots for convenience, and each slot can address up to 1Gig
then the board will allow 3 Gig to be installed. It's possible that less
than that can be addressed in total due to limitations elsewhere... I was
under the impression that 32bit systems can address 2^32 bytes, or 4Gigs,
but that there is a reserved space above 3Gigs for mapping I/O... much like
the option in the BIOS for memory hole at 63-64Meg (the 16bit address space
limit).

Essentially if you want to use the advantages of a 64bit system capable of
addressing lots of RAM, you'll need an OS that is 64bit too, which
essentially leaves you with leaked test versions of the appropriate Windows
or any semi-recent distribution of Linux, for the moment, at least.

Ben
--
A7N8X FAQ: www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html
Questions by email will likely be ignored, please use the newsgroups.
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...

It is both a matter of hardware and software. Hardware motherboard
manufacturers have built in system limits or normally 3-4 gb or less but
this will change somewhat when Microsoft releases its 64 bit version of the
operating system and that is explaned here:

Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems is designed for use on
high-performance PCs. This means new customers will be able to extend beyond
the 4-gigabyte physical memory limit of 32-bit computing.

regards

B


"Mr. E. Mann" <Mreman (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

On 25 Jan 2004 10:54:07 GMT, "Peter Strömberg" <wilfried (AT) spamcop (DOT) net>
wrote:

Says that Windows 98 runs into problems when more than 512 MB of
memory is fitted. Mine is fairly stable when restricted to 700 MB.
Needs re-booting if I have problems. I could restrict it further and
have fewer problems.


Says that Windows 98 & Windows ME will not run nor install if more
than 1.5 GB of memory are fitted. Thanks, Peter, I had never heard of
that.

I think I found another symptom of having too much memory. I could not
filll in text boxes on web pages. Ironically, this prevented me doing
a proper search for the original poster's question.

Microsoft once claimed that Windows 95 can use 2GB but I think they
lied.
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q181/5/94.asp&NoWebContent=1>

Mr E. Mann (original poster):

The 32-bit architecture of present CPUs limits them to 4 GB of RAM
(e.g . Pentium, Athlon Tbred). Windows XP, being a 32-bit operating
system will be limited to 4GB of memory. It can use at least 2GB of
memory.

At the bottom of page 16 of a Word document on the Windows NT homepage
it says that Windows NT Server is capable of addressing 4GB, split
into 2 GB for user space and 2 GB for system space.

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/do...chitecture.doc

Windows XP is based on Windows NT, so I expect the same memory limit.

The Athlon 64 can address thousands of GB. There is a beta (test)
version of Windows XP 64-bit. I expect there will be a final retail
version available by Christmas. And a Service Pack full of bug fixes
early next year. :-)

Windows 2000 Advanced Server uses something called Physical Address
Extensions (PAE) and is able to address 8GB and Windows 2000
Datacenter Server uses PAE to address 32GB. Sounds like good old
memory paging to me.

--
Arthur.

Thanks Everyone!

I didn't know people were still using win98. ;')

"B" <johnson_robert (AT) planet (DOT) nl> wrote in
news:bv0s9v$980$1 (AT) reader11 (DOT) wxs.nl:

"Arthur Buse" <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> wrote


In Windows 98 try the following addition to your SYSTEM.INI file:

[vcache]
MaxFileCache=512000


I have 1 GB of Ram and don't have any Ram associated problems with Win98SE.



--
callsignviper


The truth is out there. You just have to look in the right places and ask
the right questions.

"Mr. E. Mann" <Mreman (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote


It is estimated that in excess of 50 MILLION enterprise customers are still
using Windows 98 with several MILLION still using Windows 95 for certain
applications.


Those numbers don't even attempt to account for all the non-enterprise
customers still using those operating systems.


Supposedly that is one of the reasons M$ extended Win98 support into 2006
when it was supposed to have ended about 2-3 weeks ago.


--
callsignviper


The truth is out there. You just have to look in the right places and ask
the right questions.

callsignviper wrote:
I seem to recall a fix like this... I think cacheman does this. To be fair
I don't think you'll need a filecache of half a gig... it was my
understanding that Win98 wasn't very good at releasing RAM from the
filecache when required for applications.

In Windows 2000 a similar thing happens... but the filecache can use ALL of
available RAM (it does on my system), but due to W2Ks better memory
management it can just drop the data and replace it with other data when
required.

I recommend cacheman as an essential for any Win9x user.

Ben
--
A7N8X FAQ: www.ben.pope.name/a7n8x_faq.html
Questions by email will likely be ignored, please use the newsgroups.
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...