I'm helping to make my stepfather's computer run faster. after a 4gb memory upgrade, I noticed from task manager that xp won't use more than 2gb of ram. I was using Chrome and Firefox and experienced a lengthy freeze. It went down to about 1866mb memory usage after a few minutes and then I was able to close my browser tabs. I read about this memory tweak done by hacking boot.ini to allow 3gb of ram for apps (with 1gb hidden for other system use.) The system is a Dell XPS 410 and under the my computer window xp reports only 3gb of ram with pae enabled, but the bios shows 4gb ram installed in the computer. I have used both XP pro and XP home before, but I have never used media center edition and I have no access to any computers with XP pro or XP home because i'm on vacation with family. I tried searching for boot.ini on his Dell, "hidden files enabled when searching" and I still can't find it. is this just a well known problem with xp media center or is there an alternative .ini file used by default?

This is the link for the XP memory tweak:

http://cobolhacker.com/2008/08/06/using-4gb-o … -on-windows-xp/