XP 32bit and 4GB of mem? Can only use 3GB? You CAN use that wasted 1GB!!!

[Bloodwych]

I have a couple of PC's with 4GB RAM dual booting XP 32bit. Of course, XP 32bit only sees 3GB as the vid card uses up the other 1GB address space.

Well, I've just found out you can do a neat trick. Some RAMDISK software is capable of initiating its own kernal memory management in XP 32bit (not all do this), and uses that wasted 1GB for - an Amiga style RAMDISK!!!

I've not tried it yet, but there are free and commercial solutions. Here are a couple I found:

http://www.knowledgesutra.com/forums...-in-xp-32bits/
http://www.jensscheffler.de/using-ga...k-in-windows-7
http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php (read about "extended memory access)

The idea of a 1GB RAMDISK in XP 32-bit on a machine with 4GB RAM sounds awesome. Imagine what you can use it for - temp folder, cache folder, various XP shell folders (like those containing index.dat files), SWAP file (kind of pointless) - but at least it gets used for something. There may be a small performance hit from using PAE feature in XP 32bit, but it will be very small and nothing really on a dual core or above CPU.

May not work, but I'll try it out soon and if anyone else gets a chance or is interested post back here.