Okay, so long story cut very short... back to trying to get 4GB working on my PC. As you recall, XP Pro will not see a 4GB, even with /PAE switch in boot.ini.
Vista x32 will also not see all 4GB with /PAE in "BCD", the Vista equivalent of boot.ini.
Vista x64 will see all 4GB, without switches.
More info: Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers (like me) get Vista x32 Busines Edition only.
Retail versions come with both 32 and 64-bit verisons.
If you buy the retail version, the disc containing the 64 bit version is not included. You have to separately order that from Microsoft for a $10 shipping fee. For $6 you can get it expedited. There is no option to download. Apparently this is not true for Ultimate, which includes both discs (32 and 64 bit) in the packaging.
You can also get OEM version. OEM versions come in either 32 or 64 bit versions, but not both at the same time like retail verisons. OEM versions have licenses that are not transferrable to another PC, so if you upgrade the hardware significantly like changing the motherboard, you will need a new license. Some have reported that you can call Microsoft and tell them your old motherboard was defective and had to be replaced, they'll let you activate your copy once more, but your mileage may vary.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Sunday, January 14, 2007
The disappearing gigabyte trick...
Having finally put together my new PC, no doubt I was excited to experience the blazing speeds promised by the fast CPU, and 4GB of RAM. I frequently keep several files in Photoshop and Illustrator open at the same time, with each easily exceeding 250MB in file size. The 4GB of RAM will come in very handy.
Well, if Windows would only see that I have 4GB of RAM.
My upgrade drama continues. The first motherboard I purchased was an Asus P5LD2-VM. The specs say it supports up to 4GB of RAM. However, when you actually insert 4GB of RAM in there, the BIOS automatically "appropriates" 800+MB of RAM. This appropriated memory is completely useless and is not seen by the operating system. This is... get ready for the geekiness here... because of the 32-bit architecture.
32-bit addresses can only go up to 4GB. All memory and peripherals (such as the video card) in the system share a pool of 32-bit addresses. If all 4GB of memory were available to the OS, the OS has no way of addressing the peripherals in the system. Thus, a portion of the RAM is taken away to make room to properly address these peripherals. This apparently is not unique to the Asus P5LD2-VM. It affects all motherboards that use the Intel 945 chipset. Presumably, older chipsets would have this issue as well.
To get around this and to make all 4GB available to the OS, is to "remap" the additional memory. The 800+MB of RAM is allocated to address space above the 4GB mark. If you have a 64-bit OS or an OS that can utilize PAE (Physical Address Extension), then it will be able to utilize all 4GB of RAM. But, your chipset has to have this feature, and the Intel 945 does not. The motherboard promptly went back to the place where I bought it from. I wish the specs on the motherboard would make it clear that though it can support 4GB, you don't actually get to use all of it.
And for those who think simply having a 64-bit OS will take care of the problem, as many on the net seem to think so, it doesn't. I've installed Windows XP x64 edition and it didn't help.
The solution is to find a motherboard that has a chipset that will do this. Some Nvidia chipsets can do it, though I'm not sure which. I do know that my new motherboard, an Intel DG965WH, does. It's based on the Intel 965 chipset. The motherboard advertises that it supports 8GB of RAM.
On to the OS... I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro (32-bit version). After it's installed, I needed to add "/PAE" to my boot.ini file. After that, I restarted the machine, and it was able to see all 4GB of RAM, as reported by System Properties. It also says "Physical Address Extension" underneath that to tell you it's using PAE.
Absolutely perfect... I'm excited now. So I proceeded to install all the latest updates, patches, and all my apps. Mysteriously, System Properties all of a sudden started reporting only 3.25GB of RAM is in my computer. It still has the PAE message underneath. Strange.
Apparently letting PAE use all 4GB of RAM was giving some device drivers stability problems. So Microsoft decided that in SP2, they would limit the amount of RAM available back down to 3.25GB, even with PAE on, so that the device drivers would be more stable.
Nice going.
So basically, it comes down to, you need a 64-bit OS to really utilize 4GB of RAM properly. My options: Windows Vista 64bit, and Windows XP Pro x64.
I tried XP Pro x64 earlier. It wasn't bad. It's very responsive and very snappy. I really liked it. The problem is there are very few device drivers for it. Because it's not a very popular OS, I'm guessing a lot of manufacturers decided to skip making drivers for it. That was a huge problem for me because half of my peripherals do not have x64 drivers.
Vista seems to be more popular with the manufacturers. Because Microsoft is making such a big push for Vista, manufacturers are fast to prepare Vista drivers.
Because I'm subscribed to Microsoft Action Pack, my copy of Vista is due to arrive any day now. So for now I will live with my 3.25GB of usable RAM until Vista arrives. I hope it gets delivered soon.
Well, if Windows would only see that I have 4GB of RAM.
My upgrade drama continues. The first motherboard I purchased was an Asus P5LD2-VM. The specs say it supports up to 4GB of RAM. However, when you actually insert 4GB of RAM in there, the BIOS automatically "appropriates" 800+MB of RAM. This appropriated memory is completely useless and is not seen by the operating system. This is... get ready for the geekiness here... because of the 32-bit architecture.
32-bit addresses can only go up to 4GB. All memory and peripherals (such as the video card) in the system share a pool of 32-bit addresses. If all 4GB of memory were available to the OS, the OS has no way of addressing the peripherals in the system. Thus, a portion of the RAM is taken away to make room to properly address these peripherals. This apparently is not unique to the Asus P5LD2-VM. It affects all motherboards that use the Intel 945 chipset. Presumably, older chipsets would have this issue as well.
To get around this and to make all 4GB available to the OS, is to "remap" the additional memory. The 800+MB of RAM is allocated to address space above the 4GB mark. If you have a 64-bit OS or an OS that can utilize PAE (Physical Address Extension), then it will be able to utilize all 4GB of RAM. But, your chipset has to have this feature, and the Intel 945 does not. The motherboard promptly went back to the place where I bought it from. I wish the specs on the motherboard would make it clear that though it can support 4GB, you don't actually get to use all of it.
And for those who think simply having a 64-bit OS will take care of the problem, as many on the net seem to think so, it doesn't. I've installed Windows XP x64 edition and it didn't help.
The solution is to find a motherboard that has a chipset that will do this. Some Nvidia chipsets can do it, though I'm not sure which. I do know that my new motherboard, an Intel DG965WH, does. It's based on the Intel 965 chipset. The motherboard advertises that it supports 8GB of RAM.
On to the OS... I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro (32-bit version). After it's installed, I needed to add "/PAE" to my boot.ini file. After that, I restarted the machine, and it was able to see all 4GB of RAM, as reported by System Properties. It also says "Physical Address Extension" underneath that to tell you it's using PAE.
Absolutely perfect... I'm excited now. So I proceeded to install all the latest updates, patches, and all my apps. Mysteriously, System Properties all of a sudden started reporting only 3.25GB of RAM is in my computer. It still has the PAE message underneath. Strange.
Apparently letting PAE use all 4GB of RAM was giving some device drivers stability problems. So Microsoft decided that in SP2, they would limit the amount of RAM available back down to 3.25GB, even with PAE on, so that the device drivers would be more stable.
Nice going.
So basically, it comes down to, you need a 64-bit OS to really utilize 4GB of RAM properly. My options: Windows Vista 64bit, and Windows XP Pro x64.
I tried XP Pro x64 earlier. It wasn't bad. It's very responsive and very snappy. I really liked it. The problem is there are very few device drivers for it. Because it's not a very popular OS, I'm guessing a lot of manufacturers decided to skip making drivers for it. That was a huge problem for me because half of my peripherals do not have x64 drivers.
Vista seems to be more popular with the manufacturers. Because Microsoft is making such a big push for Vista, manufacturers are fast to prepare Vista drivers.
Because I'm subscribed to Microsoft Action Pack, my copy of Vista is due to arrive any day now. So for now I will live with my 3.25GB of usable RAM until Vista arrives. I hope it gets delivered soon.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
New PC, old components
As a graphic designer, I work with various multimedia tools on a daily basis. Of course there's the typical design tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver and Flash. But I also work with encoding video for web streaming and use a variety of tools, such as Flash Video Encoder, On2 Flix, and Procoder. So when my 3-year-old PC (yes I do a majority of my design work on a PC), started showing its age by taking 5 whole minutes to add filters to a 400MB file in Photoshop, or taking 2 hours to encode a 15-minute video, I felt it was time to upgrade.
Having had great experiences with Dell, I thought I would buy a new one from them. I would buy one with an Core 2 Duo CPU with 4GB of RAM. To save money, I planned to configure the machine to have a small hard drive then add my old hard drives into the new machine. Likewise, I would configure the new machine to have a basic CD-ROM Drive, then install my existing DVD burner into the new machine. Brilliant.
Luckily I had a chance to take a look inside a new Dell machine before I placed my order. Inside a Dell Dimension desktop, which I was about to buy. The machine I saw was an Athlon 64 X2, so not exactly the same as what I was planning on buying. Nonetheless, I noticed that inside this Dell Athlon machine, there were no Parallel ATA (IDE) ports. Everything was SATA (Serial ATA). Not only that, internal power plugs were scarce. There were 1 3.5" floppy power, 2 SATA, and 1 traditional connectors. This was a problem. All of my old hard drives were using the old Parallel ATA standard. Even if I were able to connect Parallel ATA, I wouldn't have enough power plugs for all of them.
I immediately scrapped my plans to buy a Dell. Instead I decided to buy parts to build my own. I calculated the cost of all the parts, and it came out to be about the same as buying a brand new Dell. But, I was able to outfit my new PC with better components and a motherboard that can support parallel ATA drives.
More on my upgrade coming soon.
Having had great experiences with Dell, I thought I would buy a new one from them. I would buy one with an Core 2 Duo CPU with 4GB of RAM. To save money, I planned to configure the machine to have a small hard drive then add my old hard drives into the new machine. Likewise, I would configure the new machine to have a basic CD-ROM Drive, then install my existing DVD burner into the new machine. Brilliant.
Luckily I had a chance to take a look inside a new Dell machine before I placed my order. Inside a Dell Dimension desktop, which I was about to buy. The machine I saw was an Athlon 64 X2, so not exactly the same as what I was planning on buying. Nonetheless, I noticed that inside this Dell Athlon machine, there were no Parallel ATA (IDE) ports. Everything was SATA (Serial ATA). Not only that, internal power plugs were scarce. There were 1 3.5" floppy power, 2 SATA, and 1 traditional connectors. This was a problem. All of my old hard drives were using the old Parallel ATA standard. Even if I were able to connect Parallel ATA, I wouldn't have enough power plugs for all of them.
I immediately scrapped my plans to buy a Dell. Instead I decided to buy parts to build my own. I calculated the cost of all the parts, and it came out to be about the same as buying a brand new Dell. But, I was able to outfit my new PC with better components and a motherboard that can support parallel ATA drives.
More on my upgrade coming soon.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Welcome to my first post
It's finally happened. I have a blog.
So welcome to my first post, and my first blog. As if we needed another blog on the web. I know, I said the exact same thing. A couple of weeks ago I started with the simple idea of upgrading my PC to something speedier. Fast forward two weeks later, I'm still not fully up and running on my upgraded PC.
During these two frustrating weeks, I've searched all over the web looking for information to cure my problems. That's when I came across many wonderful blogs that explored some of the issues I had with my PC, and that's when I felt I should start my own blog and share my experiences with the rest of the net, and hopefully help some people out.
But this blog isn't just about upgrading PCs. No. As my name implies, I'm a graphic designer and I run my own business, so there's plenty to share there. If I come across any cool design tools, I'll definitely write about them. I have a bachelor's degree in computer science so I can be technical, and I also have an MBA in e-Business, so I'll inject some business sense in here as well.
So that's it for now. I will probably be writing my first series of posts soon. It's related to my upgrade nightmare, and it's something that graphic designers who work with PCs should definitely check out because it will save you a lot of headaches!
So welcome to my first post, and my first blog. As if we needed another blog on the web. I know, I said the exact same thing. A couple of weeks ago I started with the simple idea of upgrading my PC to something speedier. Fast forward two weeks later, I'm still not fully up and running on my upgraded PC.
During these two frustrating weeks, I've searched all over the web looking for information to cure my problems. That's when I came across many wonderful blogs that explored some of the issues I had with my PC, and that's when I felt I should start my own blog and share my experiences with the rest of the net, and hopefully help some people out.
But this blog isn't just about upgrading PCs. No. As my name implies, I'm a graphic designer and I run my own business, so there's plenty to share there. If I come across any cool design tools, I'll definitely write about them. I have a bachelor's degree in computer science so I can be technical, and I also have an MBA in e-Business, so I'll inject some business sense in here as well.
So that's it for now. I will probably be writing my first series of posts soon. It's related to my upgrade nightmare, and it's something that graphic designers who work with PCs should definitely check out because it will save you a lot of headaches!
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