douglar wrote on 2023-01-16, 23:54:My dad still runs a wolfdale E8400 as his main computer with a G45 asrock motherboard, windows 10 32 bit with 4gb ram and I had […]
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My dad still runs a wolfdale E8400 as his main computer with a G45 asrock motherboard, windows 10 32 bit with 4gb ram and I had a nvida 1030 2GB video card handy.
Windows 10 refused to use more than 3GB, even after PAE was enabled. Seems to be an arbitrary market segmentation decision and not a technical limitation. I wanted to install this patch, but my dad didn’t want me breaking his computer before he finishes his taxes.
https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2019 … -ram-patch.html
Never got a chance to put the video card in either.
I’ll get another shot at it in April.
It's actually an arbitrary limitation due to an intentional or maybe unintentional breakage of core stacks (namely USB ones) by M$ since XP SP2, though some poorly written drivers (probably misled by the ways M$ documented these parts) may also cause issues.
RAM above 4GB was usable from 2000 to XP SP1 and was never supposed to be an issue provided all drivers are correctly written. M$ simply wants you to move towards 64-bit in which they have more control over core system components, namely the kernel.
In your case, with just 4GB of RAM the usefulness of the patch is rather limited. 32-bit processes won't be able to use more than 2GB of RAM anyway, and that applies even to 32-bit processes launched in 64-bit Windows as well.
