4GB RAM with 32-Bit Vista

I've heard a few people say that a 32-bit OS cannot mathematically handle 4GB, and then they went on to describe something in more detail than I born to understand.

At the moment, I run 2GB of RAM on 32-bit vista, with a view to upgrade to 4GB in a few months. On the other hand though, I have also heard people say that 32-bit Vista can handle up 16GB of RAM.
Note, I am on 32-bit Vista Ultimate

Basically, I'm after a definitive answer as to whether or not my current 32-bit Ultimate will happily handle 4GB of RAM. :)

Thanks

Vista seemed slightly faster with 4gb but do I remember that it did not recognise it all. However I removed 2gb for another project so I cannot check now!!

32bit Vista can, by default, only address 4Gb of memory. Various devices, chips and cards on your system all need to be accessible, so they each get a portion of this memory space allocated to them, with whatever remains after that being allocated to the ram.

As such, you are likely to only be able to see 3.2Gb of the 4Gb by default.

You can enable extended addressing, which allows windows to move hardware devices to above the 4Gb barrier, however this requires that the drivers for these devices support this. In old XP land, this was generally considered to be a bad idea, as many drivers were not compatible. However, if you are using only drivers written and tested exclusively for windows vista, you should be able to do this, but be warned that you will still need a compatible motherboard and you could well still have driver issues.

One final thing to keep in mind is that increasing your system ram is not a magical route to better performance. You will only notice the gains if your physical memory usage is regularly reaching your system's limit.

Just search on here for the answer, it comes up several times a week :)

As the man said 'google' it.

I have done endless posts in here on it. Search via my username - I've gone into great technical detail :)

2^32 = 4,294,967,296 => 4 GiB

Geddit? So anything else with RAM in (e.g. graphics) will be subtracted from your 4 GiB RAM in order for it to remain addressable.