I heard there was some kind of patch that let's a 32bit Windows installation use more than 3.25GB of ram(which is the limit for a 32bit OS).This patch doesn't remove the 2GB memory per process limit, but it will overall make the system user all the ram available.
Windows 7 32 bit memory limit patch
Before applying/looking for a patch make sure your hardware supports 64bits. A 32 bits hardware will allow you to have a memory address of 4Gigs (addressable from 0 to 4294967295) which includes your RAM and all the addressable hardware such as a video card. Trying to change the address space of an OS might cause your system to crash requiring a new install.
-patch-updated-for-windows-7-sp1/Works for me. Before applying it, I only got usable 2.5 GB from 4GB installed memory. As I have encrypted the whole disk with TrueCrypt, I don't want to go through the hassle of decrypting them, reinstalling Windows, installing my development stuff, etc.Did it work? I tried disabling the pagefile, then opening instances of Visual Studio until it barfed at 3.8 GB memory usage. Since I still have the original kernel, I tried booting the original kernel, and voila, it actually barfed at 2 GB memory usage. So yeah, it works.The caveat is, your program still only be able to access a total of 2GB private memory and 2GB shared memory. Remember that some application even share those 2GB memory. But unless you're using a huge memory eater apps like Photoshop or Premiere, things should do fine
When Windows NT was first being developed back in the early 1990s you were lucky to find hard disks with a capacity over 2GB, let alone that much physical RAM. The initial design decision was to split the 4GB virtual address space that every 32-bit process would be limited to into two halves. That meant 2GB was reserved for the system (or kernel space) and 2GB for the application (or user space). Even today this address space limit of 4GB is still in effect for 32-bit processes. What the Windows engineers have done instead is provide a variety of techniques to either shuffle the kernel/user allocation ratio about or provide other APIs to allow larger memory regions to be allocated and different portions of that to be mapped into the process address space on demand [ Russinovich ].
To diagnose a process breaching its own limits you can monitor it with PERFMON.EXE and watch the Process Virtual Bytes and Process Private Bytes counters. The former represents the amount of virtual address space that has ever been allocated for heaps, page-file sections, executable code, etc. The latter is the number of Committed Pages which represents the footprint of the process within the total memory available to the system.
There is another way to access all that extra memory using the existing Windows APIs in a manner similar to the AWE mechanism, but without many of its limitations: Shared Memory. Apart from not needing any extra privileges the memory allocated can also be paged which is useful for overcoming transient spikes or exploiting the paging algorithm already provided by the OS.
I have previously used shared memory segments very successfully in two 32-bit COM heavy services that ran alongside other services on a 64-bit Windows 2003 server. One of them cached up to 16 GB of data without any undue side effects, even when transient loads pushed it over the physical RAM limit and some paging occurred for short periods.
The patchpae2.exe file from Wen Jia Liu (wj32.org/wp/2016/02/01/pae-patch-updated-for-windows-10/) does not work with an up to date Windows 7 SP1 installation due to a new loader from Microsoft. However, Jarek has modified the patcher to work correctly with the new loader: jurasz.de/en/jarek/patchpae2.
It seems to me your article is aimed at people who are running 32 bit windows on 64 bit systems. If however they are using it on a 32 bit system (32 bit processor such as say Pentium IV or so for example), then there is indeed a physical reason why the OS cannot access memory up to and possibly above 4Gb and that has to do with the systems possible inability to actually address that memory at a hardware level, in order to do so the system must support PAE (Physical Address Extensions), but even then, PAE is not supported on all 32 bit systems and is typically only present on some of the most recent 32 bit motherboards (say within the last 10-12 years or so roughly). Of course if they are using a 32 bit version of Windows on a 32 bit system that supports PAE then there is also no real need for software like you mentioned in your article to enable support for PAE in the OS as versions of Windows from Windows XP on up already have support for PAE built in. Though admittedly in the case of Windows XP at least it may not be enabled by default and may need to be enabled through the use of a boot.ini modification. The details of which can be found easily enough using google. Additonally there are boot.ini modifications for XP that can be used to enable support for processors using HyperThreading or similar technology which can also help to improve performance for those using XP on a newer motherboard based system.
Ok quick question. I have a sony vaio vgn ar350e laptop running win 7 32bit ultimate. Sony says max ram is 2gb..I have 2 ram slots 1gb sticks in each..will this patch allow me to up the ram to 2 4gb ram sticks or is ram limited to amount by the motherboard itsself or just the os and number of ram slots? Thanks
When I installed it, everything worked fine until about 5 minutes into using my laptop, the screen flickered in multi-colors and then went blank and would not come on again. I re-started with the non-patched windows 7 and it is fine. It was still showing 70 mb reserved for hardware. Any reason why the screen would not work? I have intel graphics integrated with the ram for my laptop.
I see a lot of 64 bit users insult this patch a lot. A few things they say is true a 64 bit operating system will run your memory faster helping in benchmarks. However this patch will definitely improve memory use, memory speed and benchmarks in your 32 bit operating system. Yes the 64bit operating system is faster. But not by much if you have a good video card. If you hate to spend money and need a good video card, The 650ti will give the high end performance of an expensive card at half the price, and better specs. It should play all new game titles for at least the next 2 years. $114 plus $25 rebate and free delivery. I got mine in 6 days. newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127725
X86 client versions with PAE enabled do have a usable 37-bit (128 GB) physical address space. The limit that these versions impose is the highest permitted physical RAM address, not the size of the IO space. That means PAE-aware drivers can actually use physical space above 4 GB if they want. For example, drivers could map the "lost" memory regions located above 4 GB and expose this memory as a RAM disk.
In case you're wondering why things are this way on x64 system, here's a brief explanation. On x86 systems, all applications are given 2GB of virtual memory out of the maximum 4GB available for the 32-bit architecture: the other 2 GB are reserved for the operating system itself. On x64 systems these additional 2 GB can be accessed by any 32bit application, as long as a specific flag is set in the file's internal format. The patch tool does just that... and it actually works!
Users stuck on 32 bit Excel were limited to only using 2GB of RAM for their Excel/Power Pivot models, no matter how much memory was available on the PC. The answer to this in the past was to install the 64 Bit version of Excel, as that could address up to 8 TB of memory (if you had it, of course.)
The first 3GB of physical address space has RAM in two ranges because some is lost at the top of the first 1MB (for reasons of compatibility that go all the way back to the original IBM PC) and some more is lost at the end of the 3GB. The next 1GB is so much given over to device memory that instead of wasting RAM at 3GB, hardware remaps the RAM from there to the end of all other RAM, where it shows as the last of the ranges. The total amount of addressable RAM in the first 4GB is 3,143,338KB, i.e., 3069MB and 682KB. On this machine, with its present configuration of hardware, if the kernel is limited to the first 4GB as its physical address space, then 3069MB (and the spare change) is all the RAM that the kernel can possibly use. Get the kernel to recognise physical addresses above 4GB, and it picks up the other 5GB, for a total of 8189MB as shown in the picture.
For the question of whether the kernel in 32-bit Windows Vista will use all the physical memory it learns about from the loader, the hard-coded limit of 4GB is dominant as the maximum address for the ordinary kernel, which truly cannot form addresses for physical memory above 4GB, but the license limit is dominant for the PAE kernel. If you have physical memory above 4GB and wonder how it can be that the PAE kernel does not use that memory, the answer is licensing. Code for using memory above 4GB is present in 32-bit Windows Vista as Microsoft supplies it, but Microsoft prepares license values in the registry so that this code never gets to work with any physical addresses above 4GB.
Let me stress that although I have to modify the kernel, using memory above 4GB does not require a change to even one byte of code. That I modify any code here is merely to simulate the provision of different license data by Microsoft. Much as you can buy Windows Vista Home Basic and then upgrade to Home Premium without having to reinstall Windows, you might upgrade to a configuration in which the two license values for memory limits are raised. Because Microsoft protects those license values, this patch is as close to that upgrade as can be arranged unless Microsoft makes the license upgrade available. If you patch the kernel and your tests then show to your satisfaction that your drivers are safe (though perhaps only after you disable defective drivers and install the latest updates from their manufacturers), then a license upgrade from Microsoft is what I intend you to seek. 2ff7e9595c
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