More than one will be seen in this situation: within months of acquiring a new computer for the intel pentium 4 3000mhz type wants to have more memory and goes out to buy an additional 1 GB module. Come to the store, however, and taking advantage of the RAM is so cheap, you change your mind. If the plate supports a maximum of 4 GB, why not stretch a little more spending and achieve something more slack to experiment with virtual machines, computer graphics, computer forensics and other acrobatics which serve to distinguish the demanding of a vulgar hacker of the e-mule user? Finally, Cape is the RAM what differentiates good techie, not the micro megahertz, as mistakenly believed. Back home, after unpacking and installing our two brand new kingston 2 GB modules, we find the first surprise. Windows XP only recognizes 3 GB or in the best of cases something more. Perhaps one of the modules is defective. Before claiming decided to do tests: first with one of the modules, then with the other, to know which fault.

But it turns out that the two are working without problems. By repeating the tests with Linux you will have the same result. Surprisingly the BIOS is able to see the four gigabytes of RAM. Suddenly we fall in the account that you are using 32-bit operating systems. Just do some numbers to get tracks from where you can walk the cause of the problem. high 2 to 32 da 4.294.967.296 (4 GB), which is the maximum memory addressing space.

We do not have all of the same because the system reserves a giga to map devices such as graphics card or PCI components. At the expense of a fall in performance we can resort to various tricks that allow us to take advantage of the maximum number of supported RAM. To exit doubt we don’t have to do the same tests as before with a theoretical system of 64-bit – with a memory addressing around 64 GB-. No need to purchase a birthweight version of Windows for servers. We do not even have to do the minor change in the configuration of our software. Simply download one Linux live-CD for 64-bit architectures and boot up the computer with her. Using the performance monitor or a simple proc/meminfo cat in bash console, then we will see our four gigs of RAM alive and kicking. This is a phenomenon of exhaustion is very similar to that occurred some years ago with the famous memory limit of 640 KB of Microsoft DOS. This time the fault is not Bill Gates. In 1978, when he left to the vax, the first 32-bit computer market, and 64 kilobytes of memory seemed to us an astronomical figure even for the most powerful mainframe, the idea of exhausting the maximum address space of 4 GB single would have occurred to the writers of Star Trek. Matter of centuries, if it is that you came. Three decades have passed since then, and we’re on the other side of what then seemed to be the last frontier of the 32 bits.