windows XP question
 

been thinking about putting windows XP on the secondary hard drive for those games that require something that can run 16 bit games that just cant be played on windows 7 i am also thinkong about turning it into my gaming harddrive . My question is will windows XP have more than 4 gigs of RAM on it and recognize/use it?

Any 32-bit OS will only recognise and use 3.5, to use more you need a 64-bit OS of XP, Vista (spits), or W7 flavour.

It's ok to install those things that cannot run on W7 but game load times for W7 are generally faster for the others.

There can be some trouble when installing XP AFTER Win 7. It can happen that Win 7 won't boot up. But there is a workaround. If you install XP first, all will be fine.

Please don't bother with XP 64bit, its horrible. Vista 64 bit is better lol.


The thing is, you need a 32 bit OS to run 64 bit programs. Even 32bit version of windows, even 7 and 8 can run 16 bit programs (although the newer versions of windows might run into compatibility problems)

XP 64 driver support was ...hmm... tricky. But after having it set up properly, it ran rather stable. NEVER touch the installation then again.

VMWare has come along way.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html

tried VM ware before around the holiday seson but ran into much of the same problems minus the need a 32 bit OS to run errors. i think it all comes down to the games i am talking about are for win 95/98 (and yes they ran on XP way back) all i was just kind of hoping is to be able to get some of the games that where designed for that would "red line" the RAM to run more smothly. as for install issues like i said different hard drive that never had windows installed or was RAIDed to my primary.

i also remember one of my friends that was more geeky than me once said that their was a way to "bypass" the 4 gig XP issue and that the 32 bit systems of later OS had a self imposed limit built into them. i remembered that it had something to do with editing a kernal (this was when i was not so intreasted in computers though and would kind of ignore him though) and a seach of google is as much a pain in the stern. oh well.

that is not true lol, you can't magically turn 32 bit into 64 bit lol.

I am sitting in a restaurant in France, so my memory might be fuzzy, but 32 bit can only address 3.5 GB something of ram because that is 2^32 bits. 64 bit allows you to use a lot more ram because it can address 2^64 bits of it.

Well, say the magic words Physical Adress Extension (PAE), and it is done. But it is apparently limited to Windows Server editions. Windows clients are still limited to 4GB with 32 bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_address_extension

thats it lol. sory guys this wifi card is on the fritz and been meaning to get a new one to replace it so all edits are becuase of double posts from said wificard