|
| This is a quote from an older post.
I really dont know why, but this issue gets debated over and over. And I Googled it just for fun .............. wow ................ a lot of misinformation floating around out there. No wonder there are so many questions about it. I really wish people wouldnt assume anything they read online is fact, and then puke it back up as verified fact.
A 32 bit OS will use 4GIG. Close enough to it that we can call it 4GIG . A portion of that 4 will be alocated to other functions and Windows will not report all of it. That doesnt mean it is not being used, or that it does not help. People also need to remember if they have integrated video, that what ever portion of the RAM that is dedicated to vid, will not show up under Windows. The limitation is with the number of addresses availible in a 32 bit enviroment. I wont pretend to remember all the wonderful details ............ ( In Vista SP1 , i think all 4 GIG shows up under Computer properties ........... which was done just to make people happy when they looked....... .. it really doesnt change the amount of memory that is being addressed ) In a 64 bit enviroment ............ there are many more addresses availible and the limitation is then with the hardware and the OS ............. The numbers would look something like this ........ 2^32 (2 to the power of 32) = 4294967296, which is 4 GB. And 2^64 is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 . Or another explination would be something like this ........Addressing Ranges: •1-bit addressing lets you talk about 2 unique addresses (0 and 1). •2-bit addressing lets you talk about 4 unique addresses (00, 01, 10, and 11). •3-bit addressing lets you talk about 8 unique addresses (000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111). •and after a long while... 32-bit addressing lets you talk about 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. •and after an even longer while... 64-bit addressing lets you talk about 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique addresses.
I have no doubt that there is someone that can explain it a lot better .......... but thats the best i can do right now and I really odnt have time to research it more.
| |
|
Shopping on Dell
