Why 3gb switch

OK - so let's quickly recap what we've discussed so far. It is useful if you have an application that can take advantage of a larger address space. This flag has no effect when running the application on a system with a 2-GB user address space. Due to the way that Exchange handles memory management, the additional 1GB of user mode memory is required to ensure that the Store.

I doubt that it would have any effect in a bit system. Eximo Titan Ambassador. May 27, 20, 1, 90, 4, Does nothing for a 64bit Windows install. All 4GB would already be present. Still applies to Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8. Aug 24, 13, 58, 1, From what I can see in most systems that I've dealt with, about half of the used physical memory in a given system, regardless of how much memory the system has physically installed, seems to be allocated to the OS.

I thought the 3GB switch was to release some of this memory that I believe is cached by Windows back to the system for application usage? Is the available memory what is available to the applications? Because then there is FREE memory, which is basically near zero. I never could fully understand the impact of these items Cached i understand is cached by the OS for use for drivers and other system services.

Available is what i thought was available to the OS for application usage?? Mar 25, 59, , 16, You can get a solid state hard drive and put the paging file on that so you don't need to re-install everything by simply replacing the hard drive. This may differ from system to system. Once you have updated your boot.

If you choose the 3GB version and it fails to allow Windows to properly load, just restart your system and you will be given the two options once again, where you can then choose the standard Windows XP version to load.

Either way, if it works or doesn't, you can then remove whatever line you don't need in the boot. Alternately, you may wish to leave both settings so that you can choose to boot without the 3GB switch should you ever have problems with drivers installed in the future. The boot loader will default to the first option listed in the file.

You may also wish to lower the timeout value to something quicker so that you don't have to wait for 30 seconds or press Enter with each boot. The switch is useful in this scenario. Am I right or wrong? The 3GB switch - On x86 platforms programs receive a virtual memory space.

They don't get actual memory addresses. This virtual memory space is divided up in to chunks for various purposes. Normally the first half 2GB is reserved for the program's general use. The other half is reserved for other things kernel memory commonly.

To add more, Intel came up with 4 additional bits and called them Physical Address Extensions. As mentioned above, programs have no idea what physical memory looks like, they see a virtual address space.

The above has been simplified slightly , things are never as simple as we'd like them to be. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.