Michael

Long story short; I bought RAM last winter and they were marketed as 1GB x2 (on ebay - Kingston ValueRAM) and I never paid attention to the labels. Vista Ultimate 32bit showed 3GB of RAM, as did XP Pro (which I have now), until after a few updates, then it showed 4096MB of RAM.

So, I opened up my tower and pulled the sticks out and, sure enough, I have 2x 2GB and 2x 512MB sticks of RAM installed!

So, now I updated to XP SP3, and it shows 3072MB of RAM again (3GB), and I'm wondering what happened here.. I'm sure something was overwritten somewhere, but I don't know how to go about fixing it.

I've been reading about something called /PAE, but it's hard to understand where it goes in my boot.ini file, since Microsoft's example isn't exactly what I have in my boot.ini file.

Anyone care to chime in on how to force my 32bit Windows to see 4GB of RAM again? Ideally, I'd like to see 5GB - but I know that's not a reality.

I'm thinking about going back to Vista, but doing 64bit this time, to utilize all 5GB of RAM.. and because I like to change my OS around every once in awhile, and skinning it is getting boring ..any other advantages of 64bit?

My hardware setup is in my sig, for reference.

TIA,

-mak

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My Windows partition looks like a ghost town.
Toshiba Satellite
Display: 15.4" (1280x800)
CPU: AMD Turion x2 RM-70
RAM: 3GB DDR2-800
Graphics: ATI Radeon 3100
HDD: WD3200BEVT + MHZ2320BH-G2
OS 1: Ubuntu 9.10
OS 2: Vista Home Premium x86
Tons of other extras I rarely use, as well.