RAM prices are quite good at the moment, so I'd like to upgrade my macbook 2009 to 8 GB. I don't want to upgrade windows 7 from 32 bit to 64 bit until I buy a bigger hard drive sometime in the future. Will there be any issues with using 8 GB ram in 32 bit windows? Note that the free space on the windows partition is only 4 GB with 2 GB RAM. Thanks.
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Will windows 32 bit explode with 8 GB ram?
- Thread starter vistadude
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No, there won't be issues. The any 32-bit Windows OS will see a maximum of 3.25 GB of RAM. It might physically see more (including all) but it will never ever electronically use more than 3.25GB or even address the rest.
Not sure what your question is here, but 32bit operting systems can only address up to 4GB (with some systems) this will never change, its a fixed limitation, and you can't 'upgrade' from a 32bit operating system to a 64bit one, you have to completely reinstall from scratch.
I was wondering the same thing. I use bootcamp with Windows XP, and after reading this thread I feel reassured that XP won't explode, but I'm wondering if it would slow down as a result of the RAM upgrade. I don't know much about this, but isn't it better to use RAM in two equal-sized modules? As in 2x2GB is better than 1x4GB? How would Windows use the newly installed RAM? Would it just use one of the 4GB modules? I don't want to sacrifice too much performance in XP for a slight performance gain in OS X.
Depending on what you are doing in OS X the upgrade from 4 to 8 GB can give you a huge boost. I was having trouble keeping everything open that I was using until I did the 8 GB upgrade. Well worth it.
The difference between matched pairs and not is fairly minimal though, so don't worry about that.
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