How can a user process access more than 2 GB of ram in 32-bit Windows?
By default on Windows, the most memory that a user process can access is 2 GB, no matter how much RAM you have installed in your system. With Windows XP Professional you can make it possible for a process to use up to 3 GB of memory by doing two things: 1) Modify the boot parameters in boot.ini (on my 32 bit WinXP Pro machine, it’s in: “C:\boot.ini”) to tell the operating system that you want user processes to have access to up to 3GB of RAM (This is a really important file, and if you don’t know what you are doing, stop reading this and go back to work!). This is done by adding the /3GB flag to the line of the file that tells the boot loader where the operating system is. My boot.
By default on Windows, the most memory that a user process can access is 2 GB, no matter how much RAM you have installed in your system. With Windows XP Professional you can make it possible for a process to use up to 3 GB of memory by doing two things: 1) Modify the boot parameters in boot.ini (on my 32 bit WinXP Pro machine, it’s in: “C:\boot.ini”) to tell the operating system that you want user processes to have access to up to 3GB of RAM (This is a really important file, and if you don’t know what you are doing, stop reading this and go back to work!). This is done by adding the /3GB flag to the line of the file that tells the boot loader where the operating system is.
