http://live.pirillo.com/ – Windows Vista 32 bit "supports" up to 4GB of memory, but is 4GB of memory enough to run Windows Vista? Sometimes it’s more than enough.

If you’re running a 32 bit system, 4GB is your technical upper limit. Of course, Windows may not report that you have all 4GB available! Addressof has a good article on why this happens:

Here is a little piece to the total 64-bit puzzle that no-one seems to be telling anyone about. In that 4GB of address space, your video card memory is partitioned. Meaning if you have a 256MB video card, 256MB is consumed in the 4GB of total addressable space that a 32-bit processor can utilize. Here’s the problem; what if you have a video card that has 512MB, 640MB, 768MB? Yup, that will be mapped to the 4GB of addressable space. So if you had a 768MB NVidia 8800 card and 4GB of RAM, you’d lose 768MB of that 4GB of memory immediately to the device making it non-accessible "memory" for the OS. And it doesn’t stop there, all of your other devices that need to be communicated with (you know, anything with a driver) consumes part of this address space. So in my current 4GB worth of RAM system, 1.25GB worth of addressable space is consumed by devices.

Under a 64 bit system you can use 4GB of memory and much more – up to 16 exbibytes! And if we know Windows, it will use all 16 exbibytes ;)

From our YouTube video mirror (4GB RAM), the user known as cpmslave codes this response:

If you have more than 2GB the remainder is used by the OS instead of paging out the OS to disc when resources are low. The private process address space is still only 2GB and is reported as such. Some apps support the /3GB switch in boot.ini, but mainly server apps, not games. The /PAE switch lets you use 36 bit addressing for server versions of Windows, up to 64GB is available – AWE API anyone!

Is 4 GB of memory enough to run Windows Vista? Yes it is, according to Chris. What do you recommend?