ajdroidx

Right now I am messing around with a linux distro, linux mint and am seriously thinking about dual booting the machine by putting the Linux on the SSD I recently bought and putting back my older 500gb hard drive that I removed to install said SSD drive. I simply swapped the drives out.

Since my 500gb drive has a 32bit windows 7 on it, I know it will only support 4gigs of ram, but I thought if I dual boot, I may put an extra 4gig in my rig for linux for a total of 8gig.

I probably don't need this but I wondered what would happen if I did. Would windows just not see the other 4gigs? Or will it just not work at all like cause all kinds of errors and such?

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jwp1223

Pretty much, in fact, windows will only see 3.5 GB of your ram...if you have a 64 bit processor, I'd just put Windows 7 64 bit on there.

Also, you won't get any errors, you're just pretty much wasting space.

SUroot

Well not necessarily 3.5GB RAM. Depends how much of the 4GB maximum allocation is being used by the GPU

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argedion

I don't remember but did MS ever offer PAE or did Linux do that on its own. IF there is a XP version with PAE you could get all your memory to show in a 32 bit however I'm not sure XP could handle it.

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mrspeedmaster

You can add PAE to Linux after the fact.

On my Thinkpad x120e, I had 4 GB and installed 32bit ubuntu. After I upgraded, the OS only saw 3.5 but when i added the PAE extensions to the kernel, it saw all 8GB. The OS is still 32-bit but it does see 8GB.

Don't know about Windows.

linuxrich

I think Linux Mint 32 bit installs a PAE kernel automatically if it detects 64 bit architecture and/or more than 4GB ram. No reason not to install 64 bit these days though. Both my 64 bit machines (A desktop & a netbook.) run 64 bit Linux.

argedion

I do have to agree its like having a mustang engine but cutting out half the power. I love my 64 bit Fedora 32bit will also automatically install PAE but really get 64 and ROCK

nigsy

You can turn off PAE in XP but it tends to be a bit unstable - As others have said 64bit is where you want to be, or make Linux your primary OS.

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