Originally Posted by
Lemur
Like LEN said, you should see an extra gig, which will make a difference. As for shared video memory, that only applies to certain crippled motherboard-based GPUs. If you have an actual videocard, its gig (or half-gig or whatever) of RAM does not count against the 2.5 gig–3 gig limit in XP.
Actually, your video memory still has to be addressed. Meaning it probably will take yet another bite out of your 4GB maximum.
This is from an HP whitepaper:
The largest block of addresses is allocated for today’s high performance graphics cards which need addresses for at least the amount of memory on the graphics card. The net result is that a high performance x86-based computer may allocate 512 MB to more than 1 GB for the PCI memory address range before any RAM (physical user memory) addresses are allocated.
Froggy, if you're lucky, you'll see 3GB at the most if you install 4GB. Personally, I don't think 4gigs of RAM on a 32bit system is that good an investment. I guess if you have no plans of any future upgrades and want to squeeze everything you possibly can out of your current system, go for it. But I wouldn't expect any big performance gains.
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