Quote:
Originally Posted by pyr0b0y
By the way, I believe Vista x86 only reads 3GB of RAM, so you will need x64 architecture unless you are going with XP
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All common* 32-bit versions of Windows NT 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0—including XP and Vista—will support at least 4 GB of RAM and two processor cores. The 3 GB issue comes from the way memory is mapped for devices with onboard memory (like video cards).
It's mostly a driver issue, nowadays: nobody wants to rework video driver code to be sensitive to whether Windows was booted with the /PAE switch, and could therefore map the video card addresses outside of the 4 GB region. Instead, they just assume that nobody uses the top of the memory range, and reserve many addresses there for direct memory access to the video card, preventing that space from being addressed as system RAM.
*There are stripped-down versions of XP and Vista designed for some overseas markets, and not available in North America. And I'm not sure if there are extra limitations on the embedded versions.