12 replies to this topic

[Romanul]

Title thread says it all. I'm going to buy a laptop pretty soon, tho I'm having a issue: Going to x64 won't be that nice, therefore I am forced to get stuck at x86.

Problem is, with x86 I can only get 3.2 GB RAM.

So, curious what should I do. I got the following 3 laptop options(tho all links are in Romanian, I guess they are quite read-able.)

http://www.emag.ro/n...--pLX.EDR0C.013

http://www.emag.ro/n...--pLX.PMZ0C.004

One has 4GB RAM, the other has 3GB RAM, but can have a maximum of 4GB RAM (tho IIRC it cost a bit more?...)

Yes, I did take the other details into consideration, but this is, lets say, some sort of final issue ( yeah, I might find out a different one later since its not an emergency right now, I'll buy the laptop in 1-2-3 months.)

[Ash]

You might as well get whatever is cheapest. If neither is cheaper, and your motherboard supports DDR3, just get that. You won't see any appreciable benefit getting 4GB of RAM using an x86 system.

[Beowulf]

That's why people should be using Physical Address Extension (like I am on XP x86) or using a 64-bit OS.

[Phil]

Seriously, is there any reason not to go with a 64-bit OS nowadays?

[Beowulf]

Hardware compatibility. Specifically peripheral devices.

[Romanul]

That's why people should be using Physical Address Extension (like I am on XP x86).

Might sound n00b-ish - but is that some sort of patch which takes care that computers with 4GB RAM to actually use those 4GB RAM?

[Beowulf]

It helps to do this thing called "research".

[Ash]

Hmm, how do I make my XP Pro partition do that?

[Phil]

Short answer: add /PAE to the boot entry in boot.ini.
Long answer: MSDN Library.

[Blade]

It should be noted that even with PAE, the client operating systems can still only address 4GB memory total (making PAE have limited value on them). Only the 32Bit Server OS's can really use more than 4GB without some kind of hack.

[Phil]

I've read that as well.
Plus, XP seems to limit the address space for regular programs to 2GB by default, reserving the rest for the kernel and utilities. I think you can up that to 3GB but that's the hard limit.

Seriously: if you can, go with Windows 7 x64. It's not only the memory issue, but also the other new OS features you get such as Kernel Patch Protection, DEP, driver signature enforcement, etc. (yeah I know, these are not really hardcore security features, but still).

[Imagine]

I think you'd be better off getting the one with 4GB DDR2 simply because with 3GB of DDR3 on a such a low end CPU you'd just be wasting all the extra bandwidth it wouldn't make much sense. Whereas if you had something with a bit more pop! DDR3 would be worth it and you'd see a difference in real world applications.

[Beowulf]

That's actually partially incorrect. If the motherboard is designed for DDR3 [some frequency range], you should put that in there so you don't lose performance and for compatibility's sake.