Patch to enable +4gb RAM in 32bit Windows Vista/7

By Tha Bloo Monkee
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Grand Master

Tha Bloo Monkee

Posted
Posted

I came across this patch today and thought I'd share it here on Neowin :)

I haven't tested it personally.

How To Enable More Than 4GB Memory in Windows Vista and Windows 7 32-bit

Microsoft claims that it is not their fault and is instead a limitation of the 32 bit architecture. At first glance this seems correct. 32 bit processor using 32 bit registers should be only able to address up to 4 GB of RAM (232 = 4G). However, this is not actually true. The main reason being a feature called Physical Address Extension (PAE).

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Before getting started, keep in mind that this patch involves modifying the kernel. Do no proceed unless you are confident. Most security products will identify these patches as malicious since they modify the Windows kernel.

...

This patch will allow the OS to use more than 4 GB of memory. However, it does have a limitation ? more than 3 GB of memory cannot be allocated to a single application. This patch is mainly targeted at systems with more than 4 GB of RAM. However, in some cases installing this patch on 4 GB systems will also lead to an increase in available memory (which may not necessarily result in performance improvement). This may appear to be a bit strange since Windows 7 and Vista are technically capable of addressing up to 4 GB of memory.

Read more and download from:

http://www.pallab.ne...indows-vista-7/

Grand Master

Ambroos

Posted
Posted

Ugh, those things always cause problems. One of my friends tried something like that (enabling PAE in 32bit Windows, but by using the proper way to do it) and it caused nothing but problems (application crashes, BSOD's, ...).

If you want to use more than 4GB of RAM, please just upgrade to the 64bit version of Windows 7. You can even use the same license for it. Just download the iso from one of Microsoft's DigitalRiver servers and install that instead.

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