just installed a new/used P4 CPU and reinstalled heatsink and fan. humor me, I'm novice at the mechanics of computers so this was a great achievement to do this. computer works great. as times goes on I will upgrade the gear and get it more up to date starting with a SATA HDD to replace existing 120gig HDD. thanks for all your help, I'll stay in touch. Sledge
Widely believed but not true - look at the 32 bit version of Windows Server 2003, Data Center Edition, it supports up to 128GB of RAM.
Those running Windows XP, Vista or 7 (all PC OS's) max efficiency is 3.5GB Ram. One needs a 64bit OS for Windows XP, Vista or 7 to utilize more memory than 3.5GB. Windows 32bit Server 2003 and newer can utilize more than 3GB of ram but very very very few PC's are running it. No reason to with Windows 7 around.
Are you running windows server on your trading workstation? It's similar to the guy running raid with 2 harddrives.
That wasn't my point - my point is that 32 bit does not equal 4GB RAM limit as you stated. The fact that desktop 32-bit Windows doesn't support more than 4GB is a marketing/licensing decision - not a technical one. There are articles on the web on how to enable more than 4GB in (32-bit) Vista and Windows 7, not that I would run a hacked OS kernel for trading.
So your point is you can hack a 32 bit os to address more than it was intended. Why would anyone want to do that in this context? As you said you wouldn't. Now a 64 bit OS can access more than 4 g ram, like windows 7 64 bit. No hacking required. Although, not to many apps are written to take advantage of 64 bit architecture. from search as I thought... People who are unfamiliar with the real meaning behind the 4GB Windows memory limit often point out that certain versions of Windows (such as Enterprise or Datacenter editions) can actually support more than 4GB of physical memory. However, adding more than 4GB of physical memory to a server still doesn't change the fact that it's a 32-bit processor accessing a 32-bit memory space. Even when more than 4GB of memory is present, each process still has the normal 2GB virtual address space, and the kernel address space is still 2GB, just as on a normal non-PAE system.
Here is link that has specs for each operating system. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx