More Awesome Than You!

My computer has 1Gb memory and it will take 4Gb so I am planning to upgrade.  Peter tells me Windows XP won't recognise more than 2Gb unless you do a "bootfile hack".  Is he talking rubbish?

It will take 3,25GB, unless you're running the 64-bit version.

I have 4gig, windoze tells me I have 3,25GB.  I have no idea if the computer can somehow use the overflow...

Does that include your swap space?

Even if you don't have the 4Gb of physical memory, 32-bit Windows tells each application it can use 4Gb of "virtual" memory.

Normally, half of this is reserved for shared kernel space, but with said boot.ini hack, you can force XP to use just 1Gb for kernel space, leaving 3Gb for user-mode memory.

This article at M$ explains the pros and cons of such hack: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb613473(VS.85).aspx

Nice. It makes no sense why my system would allocate more memory for its use now that I have 4 GB RAM than when I had 2 GB RAM. Nothing has really changed.

Don't do it! Your game will be beset by a plague of twins.

Oh, wait, Windows. Nevermind.

Oh, no. It doesn't matter. 4GB-6GB of RAMZ always gives an immediate deluge of twins lasting at least four months. I just got out of mine. Only Linux systems are immune.

Oh don't worry about me, I'm well past the menopause, so I don't think there'll be any twins for us, no matter what the upgrade :D

The memory sticks go in your computer.  You aren't supposed to ingest them yourself.  ;)