You dunno what? I am telling you thats why you only see your system hit 4 GB. 32-bit OS's can only handle up to 4GB....

/sigh

I knew someone was gonna say this. Yes i know this ... BUT every system is different. So its easier to just go w/ the ballpark "4gb = 32bit" so you don't confuse people who don't understand.

You might know this, but many do not.  The idea of mentioning it is to reduce/eliminate confusion for folks who see the 'ballpark' figure as being the supposed norm and wondering: "Why the f**k have I got less?"

Ballparking may have its place when counting the crowd at a football game, but in other cases it'd better to be more specific. So in the case of 32 bit OSes, it would be better to say that they can see UP to 4 gb of RAM, depending on the system.  Some may not because the system reserves some for itself: for example, when a graphics card uses shared memory the overall figure will be less.

I know that I'd be pretty pissed if a new employer told me my 'ballpark' salary was going to be $500 per week and my first pay only contained $400.  Yup, Po` is spot on, specifics have their place orright... in some instances, ballpark figures can create more confusion than they eliminate

Hehe, who's arguing?

I currently have too much time on my hands, got bored cos I can't get out (mobility issues) and felt like getting lond-winded just to fill in a bit of time.

Actually, I wonder if that's why I can't remember shit these days, I have an aging 32 bit operating system upstairs that can't access all my memory?

starkers...Service pack 1 allows Vista to show the additional ram but if you look at your ram in taskmanager you'll see that it is not using all of it.

Yeah, you're right about task manager only showing 3.75, but Ccleaner and my Winstep CPU monitor both show 8gb. Strange, that!  The other funny thing is that I had SP1 installed prior to doing the startup repair and I recall only 4 gb being shown in the system information panel then, so it's puzzling as to why 8gb is suddenly appearing afterwards.

Oh well, I'm mostly in Vista Home Premium x64 to access the installed RAM anyway, so I'm not gonna lose any sleep pondering it.

That's why I mainly run Vista x64.. it sees and uses the full 8gb. I mainly run Vista 32 bit these days to use my webcam and a few apps that aren't x64 friendly as yet.

I will have to look into that!  I mean, my surfing habits are pretty safe and I've not had a virus/infection for years, but you never know about drive-bys and those covert bastards who hack into respectable sites to gain access to users machines.... not to mention the sneaky, drive-by pop-unders that can leave crap everywhere, your registry and etc.

Apart from my AV and firewall, I also use Spybot's constantly updated 'teatimer' to immunise against threats... not to mention AdBlock to prevent unwanted ads and subsequent cookies they can leave.  Sometimes those things can be a right royal pain in the arse to get rid of using conventional methods, which is why I also use BetterPrivacy, a FF add-on that deletes LSO's... long-term cookies that can track users and are normally undeletable using Ccleaner and the like.

Great, now I know I will buy a 64bit os next time bcoz 32bit is limited.

Can I run 32bit applications on 64bit windows?

Well I do shut it down every night. But yes it has been almost 2 years since I installed XP on this pig.

there's a major difference between those two statements, kona.

i agree with starkers. if you're not currently running vista64, skip it and wait for win7 64.

Um, like didn't you have Vista there a while back??

And what's wrong with upgrading to Win 7... it's the best MS OS to date?  Really, I've been running the Win 7 RC and feel it's pretty darned good, stability and performance-wise... and fast, decidedly faster than 2000, XP and Vista.  More importantly, it is smaller and less resource intensive than Vista, so you don't need a top-end machine to run it, just something decent and fairly reccent... meaning it doesn't necesarily mean an OS AND hardware upgrade.

At least try the free Win 7 RC to see if upgrading may be a later consideration... it runs uninterrupted 'til March 2010, but more importantly, XP support is likely to be phased out over the next 12 months or so.