Computer Performance Advice

[jeffz0rz]

Operating system makes more of a difference than most people realize, specially with ram. Windows XP 32bit edition, will only make use of 3GB's of ram, and thats only after you change some compicated settings.. I think in the registry.. I don't remember exactly how I did it, I'll find a link and post it. So right there, thats 1gb, maybe even 2gb's of your 4 that aren't even being utilized.

I also don't remember the limits for each version of windows XP and vista..

Maybe someone else can confirm?

Edit, found and copied this from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...73(VS.85).aspx

4-Gigabyte Tuning

On 32-bit editions of Windows, applications have 4 gigabyte (GB) of virtual address space available. The virtual address space is divided so that 2 GB is available to the application and the other 2 GB is available only to the system.
The 4-gigabyte tuning (4GT) feature, formerly called 4GT RAM Tuning, increases the virtual address space that is available to the application up to 3 GB, and reduces the amount available to the system to between 1 and 2 GB.
For applications that are memory-intensive, such as database management systems (DBMS), the use of a larger virtual address space can provide considerable performance and scalability benefits. However, the file cache, paged pool, and nonpaged pool are smaller, which can adversely affect applications with heavy networking or I/O. Therefore, you might want to test your application under load, and examine the performance counters to determine whether your application benefits from the larger address space.
To enable 4GT, use the BCDEdit /set command to set the increaseuserva boot entry option to a value between 2048 (2 GB) and 3072 (3 GB).

Windows Server 2003 and earlier: To enable 4GT, add the /3GB switch to the Boot.ini file. The /3GB switch is supported on the following systems:

• Windows Server 2003
• Windows XP Professional
• Windows 2000 Datacenter Server
• Windows 2000 Advanced Server

The /3GB switch makes a full 3 GB of virtual address space available to applications and reduces the amount available to the system to 1 GB. On Windows Server 2003, the amount of address space available to applications can be adjusted by setting the /USERVA switch in Boot.ini to a value between 2048 and 3072, which increases the amount of address space available to the system. This can help maintain overall system performance when the application requires more than 2 GB but less than 3 GB of address space.

To enable an application to use the larger address space, set the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag in the image header. The linker included with Microsoft Visual C++ supports the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch to set this flag. Setting this flag and then running the application on a system that does not have 4GT support should not affect the application.