Windows XP Physical Address Extension

If you own a 32-Bit computer with more then 3 GB of RAM you must be knowing that your operating-system can only make use of roughly 3 GB RAM and rest remains unused because of memory addressing space limitation on 32 Bit systems, today I will be showing how you can make use of this wasted memory improving your computer speed significantly.

The best way to utilize this wasted memory and speed-up your computer is to use it as an RAMDISK, storing frequently accessed temporary files like system pagefile, temp-files and web-browser cache, since I/O operations to RAM is significantly faster then disk you will greatly benefit from using RAMDISK as a temporary file storage.

Follow the simple guide next to create a RAMDISK and use it to store temporary files.

Few days ago I upgraded RAM on one of my computers to 4 GB, but to my surprise my Windows XP SP3 machine refused to recognize the full RAM and displayed only 2.87 GB as usable, further investigation on the problem revealed that although 32-Bit operating systems like Windows XP and Vista can address and support a maximum of 4 GB RAM but the operating system needs to reserve memory addressing space for hardware devices, so out of the total 4 GB addressing space the operating system is left with 4 GB minus the addressing space required for the current hardware configuration.

However, according to this Microsoft Article Windows XP and Windows Vista can both address more RAM using the Physical Address Extension (PAE).