[megabyte]

Reading on another thread that XP can only work with a max of 2 Ram and Vista 64bit can only work with a max of 4 Ram.

But what happens if you have MORE Ram that what the Operating system says it can work with?? I know if you didnt have enough ram the PC would struggle but too much Ram would do what???

[SocialWarfare]

If say you put 4gigs into XP than it will only utilize 3 so the fourth wont be doing anything really apart from filling a slot

[megabyte]

So Xp could possibly stretch to 3ggs then and maybe Vista may touch 4 ggs but anything above that is just doing nothing but wasting money???

Is there an operating system which can handle/use more Ram and if not why do the boards have the extra slots or is just in case of future upgrades???

Just trying to understand this

Thanks

[SocialWarfare]

Linux can use far more RAM and with a combination of Linux and loads of RAM you got yourself a great server

[SHEPH3RD]

How come some OS's can't have a lot of RAM? On the Apple store you can put like 16GB of RAM into a full-on supermac. Is there any point in this?
I'm still learning, too. :P

[kevinescallan]

If you added too much RAM then the operating system would only pick up the amount of RAM it can handle.

E.G XP = Max 2GB RAM (If you put 3GB RAM in it would only appear to have 2GB RAM Installed)

I think thats right anyway but im not too sure as im still learning aswell.

[megabyte]

One man told me he has 8gb's of Ram on his PC and still runs it with XP, before that he had 4gb's.

Still confused.

[grush]

To answer your base question nothing if you put more ram in than the OS can use it does no damage but it does no good either. There is a way to get Vista to recognize the full 4GB if i can find it I'll post it up.

[mr_miller]

it all depends on which versions of XP/vista you are talking about. 32bit XP will support ~3GB and no more as it saves some address space for i/o.PAE etc... 4GB is all the memory a 32bit os can address. You can enable AWE/PAE but I really wouldn't go that route.

If you want to run more memory upgrade to 64bit xp/vista; server 2003 datacenter/enterprise.

MacOS is by default 64bit and will address over and above this limit; and even above the 16GB quoted.

But hey you only will ever 640Kb of memory; those were the days....