Is my comp using all 4 GB of my ram ?

no, you need a 64 bit OS

but dont bother, with all the problems that comes with xp 64bit or vista for that matter, its not worth getting one more gig of ram

just keep what you have and eventually upgrade to vista 64bit

no, you need a 64 bit OS

but dont bother, with all the problems that comes with xp 64bit or vista for that matter, its not worth getting one more gig of ram

just keep what you have and eventually upgrade to vista 64bit

razorsedge678

He be correct.

meh o well its not like any games use 4 Gigs anyways. what problems come with a 64 bit os ? brayant321

I've been running 64bit Vista for about a year now and only recently have release drivers become available for all my components (and some things, like 8800gts, still work better with the latest possible beta drivers). Many programs aren't fully compatible with vista64, but most have some sort of work-around. If you're computer savvy and don't mind tinkering, vista64 is definitely workable. As for it's actual advantages, those are few at this point, mainly memory management and 64bit power. (One thing to keep in mind: vista64 has no 16bit support, period! So if you use any 16 bit programs [like AutoCAD 14], forget exclusively using vista64. If you're like me, by the time you upgrade you've got almost a whole [older] PC lying around anyway; might as well make it the winxp box for those stubborn programs!).

Getting past 4GB limit has its own merits that I won't get into here, but I will say games that exploit 64bit run nicely! Obviously, 64bit is superior to 32bit and as more programs are written to take advantage of this (on my system I know crysis and halflife2 both do) the move to 64 bit will make more sense, but right now I'd suggest waiting at least until the first service pack unless you're one of those people that get a kick out of forcing things to work!

I guess I'm one of THOSE.

Unless you use a 64-bit OS you cannot address more than 4gb of space, so no. There are workarounds, but they actually decrease performance... and your games are still 32-bit apps not able to utilize more than 2gb of memory under XP anyway (with more workarounds that won't matter performance-wise).

Crysis (to my knowledge) is one of the first games to get some performance gains out of 64-bit OS, and Alan Wake is supposed to utilize 4gb of memory for smoother gameplay.

Except of course the IE seems to crash occasionally when I head here, but Firefox still works, so it's no real biggy. As Vista's 32bit compatability is pretty spot on from what I can see -- although there'll obviously be programs that fail, always is.

That being said, heed the above poster's warning about 16bit programs.

(Sorry about not being able to quote, kept getting HTML not well formed errors :()