installing new memory ??

[m_260]

well exactly how much ram can the motherboard support? Can the PC even support more than 4gb?

[BC_Programmer]

Probably not. But at the same time some older chipsets can only cache up to a certain address. For example- RAM addresses past 64MB or 128MB or so forth will not be cached, causing all use of memory past the cacheable range to always be accessed without the cache controller.

So what, some people  think- it is still faster then disk! And they are right- except windows loads from the top of memory down, which means that almost all day to day tasks with memory will not be done through the cache controller.

I haven't a clue why this happens- most Cache limitations are present in Pentium 1 and Pentium 2 systems and their respective chipsets (the 440BX being an example- the first pentium compatible chipset only allowed for 64MB of RAM to be cached.

mid to late P2's as well as the K6-2 typically had a Cacheable range of 256MB.

the Cacheable ranges are usually announced on the post screen shown before attempting to boot.

[m_260]

I guess having a lot of memory is good but there's gotta be a point when you don't need so much memory. Exactly how many programs are you intending to run at a given time and all? With win vista, a gig of ram takes care of windows vista's background processes and a gig or a gig and ahalf of ram should do you good unless you're some uber computer user breaking in....