Computers are commonly coming with at least a gigabyte of memory in them now, and sometimes people will add memory to computers so they have two, even four gigabytes of memory. More memory is better, right? Not always. If you are thinking about upgrading to the much-maligned Windows Vista, everyone will tell you to make sure you have sufficient memory. Two gigabytes is a great starting point, and four gigabytes will allow you to run several large applications at the same time. However, if you have four gigabytes of memory in your computer, it’s impossible to use all of it. This article will hopefully inform you of some pitfalls and caveats to keep in mind before you cram all those slots in your computer with more memory.
The operating system you have at home, which might be Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux, are all 32-bit operating systems. The original switch to 32-bit operating systems happened with the release of Windows 95. All 32-bit operating systems, by design, can only address, at the maximum, 4 gigabytes of memory (232 for you math whizzes out there). That’s it. Even if you can add more memory than this to your computer, it will still only report that you have 4 gigabytes. That’s all the computer can use.
What’s even worse? If you currently have four gigabytes of memory in your computer, you won’t even be able to use all of that. That’s because the hardware in your computer, like your video card, network card, and other expansions cards, have memory too, and they need the ability to have it “addressed” by your computer. For example, if you have a video card with 512 megabytes of memory on it, surprise! Now you only have 3 ½ gigabytes of memory to use for what you want to use it for. There are few technical ways to improve the situation, and those that exist only work for high-end server applications.
What’s the solution? 64-bit computing. All major operating system manufacturers (and very quietly in the consumer sector) have now released 64-bit versions of their operating systems to the market, but they will only work with the very latest computers (such as the Intel Core 2 and AMD’s Athlon 64). Some 64-bit operating systems still limit memory expansion to a degree (such as 8 gigabytes in Windows Vista Home Basic). Theoretically, though, the 64-bit architecture can address 264 bytes, or 17,179,869,184 gigabytes (16 exabytes) of memory! Besides the ability to upgrade your memory greater than 4 gigabytes, there are few performance benefits and more incompatibility worries at this time to make such a drastic switch.
So what’s the bottom line? Without an upgrade to a computer with a 64-bit processor and a 64-bit operating system, you will never be able to have more than four gigabytes of memory. As this is an obvious limitation, watch for 64-bit computing to become popular throughout the next few years.