PCTips Box

The issue with either Windows XP or 32-bit Vista really isn’t the OS itself, but the legacy of the old IBM PC. The BIOS reserves a certain amount of memory for memory-mapped I/O. Still, even Win XP could “see” well over 3GB of RAM. It and 32-bit Vista do support something known as PAE (physical address extension), which allows applications written for PAE to use more than 2GB of memory.

However, Vista itself likes having more than 2GB of RAM. The reason is SuperFetch, the smart caching technology built into Vista. SuperFetch will happily use excess memory to help speed up disk access by keeping frequently used data cached in memory. So having more than 2GB is of greater benefit in Vista than in Win XP.

Tags:address_extension, benefit, bios, disk_access, Hardware, legacy, memory, pae, physical_address, smart, Windows, windows vista, windows xp

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