Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Thu Aug 31 09:59:22 CDT 2006
Hi John: I have never heard of a XP OS computer having more than a gig. All other systems using larger amounts of memory, that I am aquatinted with, are servers of various kinds which are suppose to better at managing memory and processes. Your limitations will definitely be the OS before the hardware. I would recommend that you try Window 2003 server standard. It is totally brain-dead to install; takes about an hour and a half to install (DVDs are slow) and asks once whether you want to use it as a domain controller. I use one as a work-station and its performance is head and shoulders above XP. It is easier to manage and it definitely uses memory better. Here is a free download that is supposed to do memory diagnostics app for windows: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Memory-Tweak/Microsoft-Windows-Memory-Dia gnostic.shtml >From M$: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/msit/operations/mscom64bitarchi .mspx What type of motherboard do you have: ASUS, GigaByte ...? Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 7:05 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'; dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com; Tech - Database Advisors Inc. Subject: [AccessD] Using 4 gbytes of RAM Is anyone using a machine with more than two gig of Ram? I am reading things about doing this and there seems to be a lot of confusion on the matter. Much of the confusion seems to come from the fact that until the 64 bit versions of the X86 processors, the "internals" of the processor were all 32 bits which limited direct generation of addresses to 4 gig. All of my machines are 64 bit (AMD) processors so theoretically they can use more than 4 gig but how? Everyone seems to agree that in XP32, only 4 gig is available to work with and that things like video cards and other "machine stuff" eats into that. Thus regardless of anything, you will end up with less than 4 gig due to that, perhaps as little as 3.25 gig. After that, confusion reigns, at least in my mind. Understand that I am discussing Windows XP 32 specifically, although anyone is welcome to chip in what they "know" regarding other windows versions as long as they specify what version they are discussing. The next thing that is discussed is that the OS itself reserves 2 gig for itself (which includes the video etc AFAICT), leaving up to 2 gig for EACH APPLICATION, implying that any application can have / use up to 2 gig. Some claim that if you have 4 gig, the swap file won't be used since that is part of the 4 gig available. It seems illogical since each application can use up to 2 gig. However I have created a separate partition to hold my swap file and tried to create one of 6 gig and Windows refused, limiting the size of the swap file to 4 gig. So I am trying to figure out what the reality is. If a machine has 4 gig physical ram, and "machine stuff" uses (for argument's sake) .75 gig, is the .75 gig of physical ram simply unused? Is it used by the OS for buffers? What about the swap file? If you have a 4 gig swap file, would you have 7.25 "total available memory" for Windows use? Does this indeed then limit the APPLICATIONS to 5.25 gig of "total" memory and 2 gig of physical memory? And what happens if you manage to get (for the sake of argument) 8 gig stuffed into a machine. Some motherboards claim to handle that much but can Windows XP 32 actually use it? Can Windows XP 64? If you need this much memory is Windows XP 64 a way to get at the memory? If you are still using 32 bit apps, will it actually map as much as 2 gig of physical memory to the 32 bit apps so that (for example) 3 high powered memory hungry 32 bit apps actually had 2 gig available to each of them all the time? If anyone has run across any authoritive (on-line) reading on the subject I would love to look at it. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com