Re: Use 3GB or 4GB RAM in 32 bit OS?

Franc Zabkar wrote:
> My Internet PC is an old socket 7 box with a Diamond Stealth III S540
> PCI card. Win98's Device Manager shows that it is using the following
> memory resources:
> 
>  FFA80000 - FFAFFFFF  --- 512KB
>  F0000000 - F7FFFFFF  --- 128MB (video RAM ???)
>  08020000 - 0802FFFF  ---  64KB
>  000C0000 - 000CAFFF  ---  44KB (video ROM BIOS extension)
>  000B0000 - 000BFFFF  ---  64KB (video RAM below 1MB)
>  000A0000 - 000AFFFF  ---  64KB (video RAM below 1MB)
> 
> Lavalys Everest tells me that the video adapter has 32MB of RAM which
> leads me to wonder why the card's memory address space (128MB) is so
> large.


I think the old DOS-based Windows OSes used a different memory
management scheme. Back then they used to map the memory mapped i/o
devices to the range between 640KB and 1MB. I think with the newer
Windows, that's all remapped in the range between 3GB and 4GB.

The whole missing 4th Gigabyte issue is reminding me of the days of the
transition from 16-bit to 32-bit os, when people were running into the
same issues, except at lower address ranges. History doesn't repeat 
itself, it just rhymes.

	Yousuf Khan