XP with 4G Ram?

[techiemon]

Hi, I would like to know what will happen if I put an additional 2GB of RAM in my PC running XP? I already have 2GB running in dual channel slots. I know that XP will only recognize 3.something GB, but I have to wonder, what about that other Gig? Will it make my computer run slower or will XP just simply not recongize it and that's it?

I have no interest in upgrading to Vista, now or in the forseeable future, but feel the extra memory would be great, especially being it is so cheap right now and I am planning to upgrade my dual core to a quad core by the end of the year.

[thideras]

Hi, I would like to know what will happen if I put an additional 2GB of RAM in my PC running XP? I already have 2GB running in dual channel slots. I know that XP will only recognize 3.something GB, but I have to wonder, what about that other Gig? Will it make my computer run slower or will XP just simply not recongize it and that's it?

I have no interest in upgrading to Vista, now or in the forseeable future, but feel the extra memory would be great, especially being it is so cheap right now and I am planning to upgrade my dual core to a quad core by the end of the year.It will use 3.5gig. It will not see the rest. No performance hit besides not having the 500mb.

[ghost_recon88]

If you don't want to punish your computer by throwing Vista on it (not that I, nor anyone else blames you), you could try XP-64 bit. I hear it supports more RAM than the 32-bit version, but I'm not sure how well its performance is compared to XP-32 bit.

[thideras]

64bit xp, according to all the posts here, is not very stable...problems with drivers etc...

[Jhonas]

You'll miss out on half a gig of Ram, although you could get 64 bit
but is it really worth doing a fresh windows install for half a gb of ram...
though my mate only has half a gig. he'd say yes....
3.5 Gb is still a lot of Ram
and if you do upgrade to vista
eventually
you'd need the 64 bit edition or you'd still be limited

[Nebulous]

64bit xp, according to all the posts here, is not very stable...problems with drivers etc...


True. 64bit XP is built around the Server 2003 kernel. I found that out when i was looking for drivers. I had to use the MS server 2003 drivers and it werked like a charm :cool:

[stereo555]

64bit xp, according to all the posts here, is not very stable...problems with drivers etc...

My .02 ...

Iam not sure why peeps still bad mouth XP x64 , as Ive been using it for close to two years now and found it to be one of the best most stable os's to date .
Ive had XP x64 on a few systems (4 rigs) , both AMD (Opty) and now C2D , and both formats ran/run extremely stable .
Iam using XP x64 on my main gaming rig as we speak ; and to tell ya the truth , I see no reason for me to ever go back to XP x86 .

I'll also be duel booting to Vista x64 this week to give that a try , but Ive already done the duel x64 XP/Vista boot on my bro's rig and things seem pretty good so far .

As long as you have fairly new hardware in your rig , then x64 is nothing to be afraid of imo . Most peeps that are having problems with either x64 os have somewhat outdated hardware that inturn have no x64 driver support .

64bit is here to stay (and is the future of the pc operating system even for the general public) ; so it can only get better .