On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 03:12:34PM -0500, John Sessoms wrote: > Took my laptop in this morning and had 4GB RAM installed (up from 2GB). > > Turns out Windows Vista Ultimate is only 32bit and limits the amount of > RAM it can use to supposedly 3.5GB - System Information is showing > 3,069.44MB which I make to be 2.99GB. > > Don't know why it doesn't show the whole 3.5GB.
Windows Vista (and XP) comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, not just W7. Which you get depends on what the seller put on the machine, if you buy a pre-configured box (although some system come with a one-time choice at initial boot time; you pick 32-bit or 64-bit, and the other gets wiped). AFAIK all the 32-bit versions of Windows are limited to using at most 3GB of memory, not 3.5GB (the 3.5GB may be a hardware limit of your machine when running a 32-bit OS). > OTOH, I found out the laptop has two physical hard drives where I > thought it had one drive partitioned into two logical drives, so I may > have more upgrade options than I originally thought. > > One thing I started thinking about this morning is installing Windows 7 > Professional 64 bit. > > Has anyone had experience with 64 bit versions of Windows? Especially > running PhotoshopCS3? We've just bought a new machine, with W7 Professional. You should check the Windows 7 compatibility center to see if your hardware is supported in 64-bit mode before doing anything else. Then check for drivers for peripherals you intend to use. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
