How does 32 bit Win work with more than 4 gb of ram?
How does 32 bit Win work with more than 4 gb of ram?
Your system will still recognize the memory capacity—thus during BIOS startup if you had 8GB of RAM, it will display 8GB available. A 32-bit operating system such as Windows 32-bit can only manage memory up to 2^32 bits, which equals about 4.29 billion bytes or roughly 4GB, not the full amount. Remember that this 4GB represents the total system memory, encompassing onboard storage for PCI/PCI-E and chipset operations. If you have 256MB across various chipsets plus 512MB for video memory, you’ll only register around 3GB of usable system memory. A 64-bit architecture offers an addressable range of 2^64 bits—over 18 trillion bytes, or approximately 16 exabytes (about 16 petabytes)—effectively limitless.
Unless running on the server edition of Windows, it can access more than 4GB thanks to PAE. 32-bit Linux systems also employ PAE when there are more than 4GB available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_A..._Extension
I wasn't familiar with the server version of Windows (and who installs Windows Server 2000 32-bit on a brand new machine). Linux was the one I knew about, and he mentioned Windows.