Anyone got experience with 4Gb of ram on 32bit OS

[conholster]

Any pros or cons? How much of the RAM is usable? Would it be better to run in 64bit mode? And what about Windows, just gaming, will it still work?

At the moment I have 2Gb installed but when doing photo editing it isnt enough, after loading 10-15 images into gimp I'm using almost all of the RAM and when when editing the comp starts swapping. Memory is dirt cheap as it is so I'm thinking of throwing in another 2 gigs but want to make sure it'll smooth sailing after that.

Thanks for your time and any replies!

[mlau]

Any pros or cons? How much of the RAM is usable? Would it be better to run in 64bit mode? And what about Windows, just gaming, will it still work?

You won't be able to use all 4GB since the systems needs a slice of the address space (usually 1GB) to map peripheral mmio spaces into. Of course, this is a non-issue with a 64Bit OS; but even there you might lose *some* of the available memory if the bios does not remap some of the memory beyond the 4GB mark
(for devices without 64bit capable BARs)

[conholster]

thanks for your reply. I went out and bought another 2 gigs of kingston hyperx ram and boy am I happy I did "only" 3546Mb is visible but the OS feels a little bit more responsive somehow. havent had the time to do any real testing yet but maybe this weekend.

[Moustacha]

If you're feeling dangerous, you could enable PAE. It involves re-compiling the kernel or getting a kernel w/PAE if it's available for your flavour. In fedora you can do "yum install kernel-pae". It allows up to 64GB RAM but any app can only use up to 4GB. If you wants apps that can use more than 4GB then you need to go to 64-bit.

[conholster]

Thanks for the tips Moustacha and mlau. I'm running Arch, and dont know how to enable PAE, probably have to ask on the forum. Just loaded and edited 40 pictures in Gimp without any slowdown, so me is happy as pig in dirt