Thinkpads Forum

Hi all - help is needed ,

Specs:
Type : T60 (8741-52G)
Memory : 2 x 2GB PC2-5300 installed

N.B, Bios shows 4096MB installed

OS Installed: Windows Vista Ultimate x32

Problem is: Vista only displays 3070MB of 4096 installled, and this should not be a T60 problem according to Lenovo.

Tryed:

Mixing around with some /pae settings, but with no luck.

Anyone know exact what /pae options is needed.?

Last question: I want to know if there is any change of getting the total 4096MB available in Vista x32 or is x64 needed?

Help me

Regards
Anders Jensen

The T60 chipset only suppports 3GB, even if more is installed. This has been widely discussed on this forum.

And 32-bit Windows will only support 3 GB regardless of the chipset.

How come my bios display 4GB installed, strange part...??

You do have 4 GB installed -- it just isn't accessible to the OS.

Please search the forum for your problem.
Just to summarize:

Bios + Chipset + OS need to support more than 4Gig

Window XP + Windows Vista are limited by Microsoft to not support more than 4Gig. You only see (4Gig - X) because the X is used by PCI devices, that use this Address space.

32 Bit OS is able to easily support more than 32 address lanes, but Microsoft does set the limits.

32 Bit Windows 2003 Datacenter edition e.g. supports 64GBytes.

when you have e.g. the 32 Bit Datacenter edition, you can use the 64GBytes, but each process only can use 4GBytes (here we have a real 32 Bit limitation). To be specific 2 GBytes is its userspace, the other 2 GBytes is system space used for the kernel. (can be changed slightly with the /3GBytes switch in the boot.ini)

tomh009 wrote:And 32-bit Windows will only support 3 GB regardless of the chipset.

32 bit Vista will address 4GB with the right chipset. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605

Did you notice the last of the system requirements, after chipsets etc:

An x64 (64-bit) version of Windows Vista must be used.

tomh009 wrote:Did you notice the last of the system requirements, after chipsets etc:

An x64 (64-bit) version of Windows Vista must be used.

Obviously not!

freakwave wrote:Window XP + Windows Vista are limited by Microsoft to not support more than 4Gig. You only see (4Gig - X) because the X is used by PCI devices, that use this Address space.

32 Bit OS is able to easily support more than 32 address lanes, but Microsoft does set the limits.

You are referring to Intel's Physical Address Extension (PAE) ... basically this is like the 8086/8088 segment registers on steroids. Not a nice linear address space, and generally not easy to manage. Windows 2003 R2EE does do this, and hides the complexity from applications, but it's by no means trivial.

Or maybe you could suggest some other OS examples where PAE is available -- and was easily implemented! -- and the additional memory is simply and easily accessible to applications?

The reality is that it's an abomination, just like the original segment registers (which were abhorrent compared to the 68000's linear 32-bit address space and symmetric register set). Otherwise Intel wouldn't have eaten humble pie and adopted the AMD64 instruction set for the Core 2 processors ...

Out of curiosity is the RAM still running in Dual mode? Or does it drop down to single?

well, I really do not care if more than 4GBytes support is easily implemented. But when I read that 32Bit OS supports only 4GBytes of memory, than this is plain and simple wrong.

We are using dozens of RedHat 4 (32Bit) installations with 4 - 16GBytes of memory running on multiprocessor servers (32Bit) without any problems. We just extended one server from 4 to 8 Gig, because it was paging in and out to Disk like crazy and Application performance went down. After the upgrade it runs like a charm, no paging whatsoever.


Kind regards

Is this in the freaking faq yet? EVERY day someone posts about this. You can't get more than 3 gigs in XP Pro!

Do you really think that putting this in the FAQ will cut down on the posts about it? Does anybody really read the FAQ?
If people would just read this thread they would know.

carbon_unit wrote:Do you really think that putting this in the FAQ will cut down on the posts about it? Does anybody really read the FAQ?
If people would just read this thread they would know.

There is already a footnote on thinkwiki.org about the RAM limit on T60's

kulivontot wrote:Is this in the freaking faq yet? EVERY day someone posts about this. You can't get more than 3 gigs in XP Pro!

this is really sad that ppl don't read the faq's anymore...so much of information already there, they could save themself so much time ...