I run 5 monitors off 3 Radeon ATI cards in XP and it seems to work fine. I did have an issue recently with one card dying (after 5 years of use) but in finding the solution I gained a monitor (went from 4 to 5). There is a recent thread about it if you care to search my name, but I don't think it was a problem related to your question. You can definitely run 4(+) monitors in XP without any issues.
i have a quad card and i run a 5th monitor through a wireless usb in my workout room so i can monitor my p&l while i workout (on those rare occasions i do). works fine
How are you guys not running into a ram issue, past system usage you are capped at 3.3 GBs? I would like to go back to xp for stability but am afraid RAM would bottleneck performance, is anyone running 6x+ 30 inch screens and doing this?
Find the right drivers and use XP Pro x64 (that after all is son of Server 2003) if you're afraid about RAM limits; but be aware that XP 64 bit is a dead OS even is fully supported until 2014.
Check your Task Manager to see how much RAM you're using. Odds are there is no "RAM bottleneck" possible in your system.
Is it impossible to use 4GB ram in 32 bits Windows XP? I heard that only about 2.7ram is usable for 4GB ram.
More or less correct. However, most multi-trading rigs won't use anywhere near 2.7G of RAM on an XP machine. Therefore having "only 2.7GB of RAM available" is not a problem and causes no reduction in performance.
Win xp 32 can access 4GB of RAM, but not all is available for programs. Some is reserved for the operating system. Win xp 64, if you can find a copy, I use one, has the same limits as win 7, a lot. More ram than you can fit on a standard motherboard. For those running fast quad video cards or two dual ones, make sure your system power supply can handle the extra draw. I run 4 monitors on both win xp 32 and 64 bit os. No problem.