renderclipps opened this issue on Apr 26, 2007 · 36 posts
XENOPHONZ posted Fri, 27 April 2007 at 6:59 PM
I've read conflicting information on that subject. I don't have the information here in front of me at the office, but there appears to be some disagreement over exactly what the reduced RAM reporting by Windows XP (32-bit) means. I saw that some people with 4G installed in their machines had Windows showing as little as 2.6G, while the average seemed to be somewhere around 3.12G. Some 'authorities' argued that this was a problem; while other 'authorities' argued that it meant nothing.
shrug
The only thing that I can personally vouch for certain is that my system now runs noticeably better than it did under 2G. Especially when dealing with large scenes in various 3D apps. This is on a Core 2 Duo machine.
BTW - oddly, upon the 1st reboot immediately after I had installed the 4G's, Windows reported only 3G of RAM available. That made me wonder if something was wrong with one of the RAM sticks. So I re-booted and checked the bios -- the full 4G was there. However: upon the 2nd reboot, Windows was reporting 3.5G -- and it's stayed that way ever since.
Anyway, seeing less available RAM than I was expecting caused me to wonder what was going on, so I did some investigation of the subject online. The techs that I checked disagreed with one another on the "whys" and the "hows" and the "what does it matter's?". So......I decided not to worry about it. It works -- and it works well.
As for 64-bit: I am planning on purchasing a second hard drive, and then installing Vista Ultimate 64-bit on a dual-boot setup with my current Windows XP installation unchanged. From what I've read about Vista/XP dual-boot, it's a snap -- and it works very well.
I understand that certain apps simply will not run under 64-bit, and that certain other apps have problems doing so. But some programs that I have -- such as Lightwave and AutoCAD -- can seriously benefit from 64-bit. So for now I've reached the conclusion that dual-boot looks like the best of both worlds.
I should know whether or not that's actually the case very shortly. Perhaps even in the next day or two. Nothing like trying it myself to find out.