Vista in 4gb

Lucky Day

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I've installed my new computer. The motherboard I'm using is the ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista edition. I discovered to my surprise that MS hasn't fixed the 4gb limit on XP yet. It reads it as 3.25. There are some workarounds apparently but its not known if they work yet (specific tweaks meant for Win Server 2003).

I installed Vista 64 and had a lot of trouble initially. In fact, it was the reason I installed XP after. Vista's setup was giving me a stop message telling me the MB wasn't ACPI compliant (the board is ACPI 3.0 as a later found out).

The real problem was the 4gb of RAM. Corsair's website has terrific support and several people got V64 to load with three sticks of RAM even though Asus' manual doesn't say that's a legit combination.

Long story short I got it to load with 2gb only.

I found a patch at MS's website that the updater didn't initially pick up. All other manual patches related to this problem my updated machine refused to load so I assume they are already installed or out of date.

This patch failed to fix the stopping problem. Does anyone know if this is still a known issue with Vista 64 in general? I'm going to take a crack at updating to the Award BIOS Beta driver 0801 (general release 0702 is unstable apparently) as soon as I've fully recovered my old hard drive.
 
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Certainly sounds like a ram problem. I have an ASUS M2N board as well, (not the same edition) and a lot of people have issue with ram.

You have probably already tried this but first try upping the vDimm in bios to the maximum level that your ram recommends and increasing the latency of the ram/disabling dual channel mode.

If that makes it stable then you can try reenabling dual channel mode and reducing the latency (step by step till it is back at the rams recommended level) and then slowly try reducing the vDimm till you find the lowest point it will run at with stability. (High vDimm is more stable but lowers the lifespan of your ram).

Are all your ram sticks matching pairs?
 
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(1) I'm running Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM, all of which is addressed.
(1b) I had to tweak some BIOS settings through trial and error to get it to work. Unfortunately I don't remember the details, but they involved addressing more than 2GB of RAM.
(2) The limit with 32-bit operating systems isn't exactly easy to fix, since the bits determine the addressable memory space; with 32 bits, it's 4 GB. The OS uses some of that, so you end up with less. IOW don't expect 32-bit Vista to be able to make use more RAM any time soon.
 
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(2) The limit with 32-bit operating systems isn't exactly easy to fix, since the bits determine the addressable memory space; with 32 bits, it's 4 GB. The OS uses some of that, so you end up with less. IOW don't expect 32-bit Vista to be able to make use more RAM any time soon.

Exactly; this is because the memory limit is an architecture issue, rather than an OS issue. Here's an image to demonstrate (shamelessly stolen from a great blog):
intel-system-memory-map.png


EDIT: Right click, view image, zoom in, if the text is too tiny for you.
 
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Great information.

I managed to fix the problem with BIOS upgrade to the current Beta. Unfortunately, it then took the broken IDE drive as the priority somehow knocked out my RAID 5 configuration.

Fortunately, I no longer get the stop error when trying to install Vista 64 but I won't be able to start it until tomorrow.
 
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for future references: How to use the 4GT RAM Tuning feature
In Windows 2000, the per-process address limit is 2 gigabytes (GB). You can expand this limit to 3 GB by taking advantage of the 4-GB memory tuning feature in Windows 2000 Advanced Server and in Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. This feature is named 4GT.

4GT reduces the potential random access memory (RAM) that is allocated to the Microsoft Windows NT kernel from 2 GB to 1 GB. This increases the user mode address space to 3 GB. Before you can take advantage of 4GT in Windows 2000 Advanced Server or in Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, you must modify the Boot.ini file to enable application memory tuning.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297812
 
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