PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I'm planning a gradual upgrade of my working 32bit W7 system to 64 bit W7 in order to play the latest games. I'll have both 32bit and 64bit W7 installed on my system. 32bit for scope and 64 bit for games.

Therefore I'm looking into upgrading my present 4GB system with 16GB's of ram (because it's so cheap, so why not)

The question is: will windows 7 32bit run on a hardware configuration with 2 x 8GB Ram blocks?
I know that I will only be able to access 4GB from windows 7, but will it work as described above?

And a bonus question: does 16GB make any difference compared to 8GB, ie: does games or other programs actually make good use the last 8 GB's of RAM?

Should work. I ran an 8gb ram on 32 bit system. Of course the system only saw 4gb till I upgraded to 64 bit but it worked.

"working" means that the system is ignoring ram above 4gb. some apps, like JBridge, will allow other apps to use the additional ram in 32bit windows, but the 4gb limit is all that 32bit windows was ever designed for. that was a stupidly huge amount of ram at one time.

Physical Address Extension!

It allows 32b windows to USE more than 4gb RAM. Each process is still limited to a 4gb window, but the system over can make use of the extra RAM.

You need a command terminal with admin rights, and then issue:
BCDEdit /set PAE ForceEnable

....will work for some apps...

OK - Thank you for the answers.

jksuperstar wrote:Physical Address Extension!

It allows 32b windows to USE more than 4gb RAM. Each process is still limited to a 4gb window, but the system over can make use of the extra RAM.

You need a command terminal with admin rights, and then issue:
BCDEdit /set PAE ForceEnable

PAE
freeze windows for me
phil