Where is my RAM?

[prasanna7287]

I upgraded my system to,

AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE @ 3.0 GHz,
Gigabyte MA78GM-S2HP motherboard,
and 4 Gb DDR2 RAM.

I have a XFX 8600 GT graphics card. After the upgrade, i installed "Windows XP 32-Bit SP-3" on my machine. It shows only 3 Gb of RAM.

I google for this and i found a lot of pages.. some saying:
"XP will recognize only 3 Gb of RAM but will utilise all 4 Gb"

some say that: "XP will use only 3 Gb of RAM and the remaining 1 Gb will NOT be used at all"

I tried installing "Vista Home Premium SP-1", it shows 4 Gb RAM. But i really dont want to install Vista on my PC.

Can anyone tell me which opinion of the above two is right and if XP cannot use all my 4Gb, what other OS can i install so that i can play the latest games and use softwares?

Thanks,
Prasanna.

 

[vaibhav_jain]

use window xp 64 bit then u can only utilise whole of your ram in xp, also u can use windows seven it is very good in features than windows vista and very fast. XP 32 bit can only recognise 3GB of RAM.

 

[prasanna7287]

Will Win 7 support games released after nfs most wanted? (nfs mw, cod 4, etc)

and just wanted to ask if anyone know how much RAM does Win 7 take when you dont use any application.. like XP uses around 300 Mb, Vista around 750 Mb.. and Win 7?

Thanks for the reply mate.. i'll give win7 a try..

 

[shaunak]

I think 1 GB around is par for Windows 7.

Windows XP 32 bit versions recognize utmost 2^32= 4294967296 Bytes of RAM. If you count it in imperial it comes to about 3.4 GB.

Windows XP 64 bit raises the RAM cap to 128 GB.
Vista x64 8 to 128+ Gb depending on Version
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition - 64 GB maximum for x86-based computers; 2 TB maximum for x64 and ia64

Since your system is capable enough, and you have a copy. I suggest you run Vista, or windows 7. Most games released recently will be compatible with Win 7.