"Why are they selling Vista machines with 4 GB, if its impossible to use that much RAM?"

Because people will buy them, and after they buy them, they won't return them. When has Dell ever really cared about its public image?

Same reason why they sold me a special Dell wireless laptop card that practically doesn't work. I'd have happily paid the extra $30 for a third party one when I bought the rig if I knew how much trouble it would cause me.
 

What about Windows Vista 64bit?
 

I am gob-smacked. Surely this cannot be true? Experience has shown that newer programs demand more and more ram. It is a sure bet that in a couple of years time programs will run sluggishly in anything less than 4Gb of RAM.
 

I Hadn't upgraded to Vista yet and don't plan to do so for a while.

Anyway one of my friend did and found that after bying Vista32 he could register somewhere at M$ website and ask for Vista64 paying only shipping&handling (about 15 euros).

Don't know/remember if that was a special offer bundled with the box my friend bought or if is generally avaible to every one owns Vista.

If needed I can post or email more info....
 

@mbp

this sure is true
thats the limitation of 32bit operating systems...
they just cant adress more ram.


@tobold

you should correct your headline in:
"Don't buy 4 GB RAM for Windows Vista 32bit"

because for the 64bit version thats not true...
 

If you're going to be playing video games then you want to stay with XP. Tom's Hardware did quite a bit of benchmarking between Vista and XP.
The results can be found here http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

Keep in mind that it's the 32bit Version of Vista but as per Tom's Hardware "Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications)."
 

When I got vista it came with an insert incase I needed the 64 bit version I could get it by mail. Seems a little silly to me.....why not just include a seperate dvd if both OS's didnt fit on one dvd. Either way I only have 2gigs of ram so have no need for the 64 bit.

Also everyone complains vista is crap. I havn't had one problem with vista yet. I've had wow crash on me once. The only thing that ever crashed. My WoW frame rate also improved....perhaps due to the 500gig hard drive I got as opposed to when I had xp and I played WoW on an 80 gig hard drive that hadn't been formatted in years.
 

Hmmm interesting. What this really boils down to is PAE ( physical address extension) not being supported in Vista. PAE is the only way you were ever able to support more than 4gb or RAM on any 32 bit operating system. Why Vista does not support it, is a mystery to me.

You basically run out of mem addresses due to the limited capabilities of a 32 bit kernel (a kernel is the engine that makes an OS work). PAE used to solve this problem.

It is not wrong to have 4gb of RAM. Your computer is still using most, if not all, of the RAM. 4gb is actually the sweet spot as far as having enough spare room to use, but not wasting very much.

The price difference between 3.5gb and 4gb is small and it really presents a problem for a lot of motherboards. It is easier to slap in an even number of sticks of equal size instead of mis-matching sizes and ending up with odd numbers of sticks.

Vista isn't a great OS, but to call it junk because of this is stupid when the problem exists in every other 32 bit OS (Linux included).

I urge everyone that can afford to do so to upgrade to 4gb or RAM. You will be happier in the end and prepared for the long run.

Everyone talking about 64 bit operating systems... you obviously haven't played games on a 64 bit OS. Most games run SLOWER and have MORE PROBLEMS because they are not programmed for the 64 bit enviroment. On top of this the drivers for most hardware devices are playing catch up to get something that actually works reliably with 64 bit OS. There is only a handful of games that have actually been patched/built to work on 64 bit.
 

Windows has support for PAE.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929580.

You can see if enabling PAE helps.
 

Surely this is really saying that regardless of your memory size, parts will be eaten by events outside of your control?

That is, not a Vista issue particularly... If you only had 2GB of memory you're still going to lose the top 512MB or whatever, yes?

4GB is all you can address with 32-bit words, but buying it's not silly. Maybe on a laptop, as it'll eat your battery life, but in general? More is better, up to 4GB for 32-bit operating systems.