Whats the maximum amount of RAM Vista can take? Installing and Upgrading Vista Discuss Whats the maximum amount of RAM Vista can take? in the Windows Vista forums; Hello everyone, I am upgrading my RAM next week, but I am interested to know what the maximum amount of RAM the 32 bit vista will take, I am only ...

[ewan_mclean]

Hello everyone, I am upgrading my RAM next week, but I am interested to know what the maximum amount of RAM the 32 bit vista will take, I am only upgrading to 2GB just now, but want to know for future reference.

[felix8406]

This is according to MS:

32-bit versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate: 4GB
32-bit Windows Vista Starter: 1GB
64-bit versions of Windows Vista Home Basic: 8GB
64-bit versions of Windows Vista Home Premium: 16GB
64-bit versions of Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate: 128GB

You can get some good info here: http://www.vistaclues.com/reader-que...windows-vista/

[Snuffy]

For the most part, the x64 support in each Vista edition is identical.
One exception is that they each support different amounts of RAM.
Vista Home Basic (and Home Basic N) support up to 8 GB of RAM,
compared to 4 GB for all 32-bit versions of Vista.
Home Premium, meanwhile, supports 16 GB.
Business (and Business N), Enterprise, and Ultimate all support 128 GB or more of memory.
(The "or more" bit refers to the fact that there are currently no PCs available yet that suport over 128 GB of RAM; when that happens, these Vista versions will support it.)

[Splicker]

Wow is 128 GB or ram possible in todays PCs?? and what could you run on a Pc that would possibly use up all that ram hehe.

[airman]

Server or a big workstation I would think could use that much ram but I may be wrong

[Snuffy]

You’re probably wondering why I picked a number as horrible as 3.5GB? Why not 4GB? Well, there’s a really technical explanation for this but to make a long explanation short, 32-bit operating systems can only handle up to 4GB of memory. In fact, this number may vary but I stuck with 3.5 GB. Along with the RAM, you also have other memory-mapped devices such as your video cards. The memory used counts towards the 4GB virtual memory address capacity of a 32-bit operating system. But actually, the world does not end at 4,096 megabytes for 32-bit Windows Vista users anymore because the Arsgeek is here to save the day.If you’ve accidentally bought 4GB of RAM, this may be a good idea. And I say may because many 32-bit operating systems begin to lose efficiency as they surpass the 4GB mark. For that reason, if you have less than 3GB RAM, it’s not necessarily the best idea to go out and buy some more RAM. If you want to utilize more RAM (between 8GB and 128GB), you can always switch to 64-bit Windows Vista. Alright, enough babbling. Let’s get started.

Steps:

1) Access cmd: Click on the Start Pearl > type cmd in the Search Bar > and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter (this allows you to run cmd in administrative mode)

2) Type BCDEdit /set PAE forceenable

“BCDEdit is a boot configuration editor for the command line. Using the above command you’ve just enabled Physical Address Extension (PAE) which can address memory larger than 4 GB. ” - Arsgeek
Enable More Than 3.5 GB of Memory in 32-Bit Windows Vista

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Quote:
You’re probably wondering why I picked a number as horrible as 3.5GB? Why not 4GB? Well, there’s a really technical explanation for this but to make a long explanation short, 32-bit operating systems can only handle up to 4GB of memory. In fact, this number may vary but I stuck with 3.5 GB. Along with the RAM, you also have other memory-mapped devices such as your video cards. The memory used counts towards the 4GB virtual memory address capacity of a 32-bit operating system. But actually, the world does not end at 4,096 megabytes for 32-bit Windows Vista users anymore because the Arsgeek is here to save the day.If you’ve accidentally bought 4GB of RAM, this may be a good idea. And I say may because many 32-bit operating systems begin to lose efficiency as they surpass the 4GB mark. For that reason, if you have less than 3GB RAM, it’s not necessarily the best idea to go out and buy some more RAM. If you want to utilize more RAM (between 8GB and 128GB), you can always switch to 64-bit Windows Vista. Alright, enough babbling. Let’s get started.



Steps:

1) Access cmd: Click on the Start Pearl > type cmd in the Search Bar > and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter (this allows you to run cmd in administrative mode)

2) Type BCDEdit /set PAE forceenable

“BCDEdit is a boot configuration editor for the command line. Using the above command you’ve just enabled Physical Address Extension (PAE) which can address memory larger than 4 GB. ” - Arsgeek
http://vistarewired.com/2007/03/29/h...windows-vista/