Bootcamp not recognizing ram in windows

[Lou Trottier]

Hi everyone and thanks for reading.

I have just migrated to a 2.8 Mac Pro 8 core with 6 gigs of ram...I installed Windows XP pro SP2 on a 32 Gb Fat partition on my primary drive using bootcamp. I had difficulty installing Windows when trying to format the partition with a NFTS. It would not read my windows install disk if using NFTS. (weird)

I have XP up and running now but it only sees 2 gigs of ram....I understand that a limitation of XP is that it can only read 3 gigs but where is this other gig.

I am currently using Sony Vegas 8 and the extra gig would probably not make a huge difference, but every little bit helps.

I migrated away from core2 quad Pc with 3 gigs of ram to the Mac and I was rendering a small project in Vegas for a client last night and the Mac seems to render significantly faster than my PC did, even without the ram not being recognized....The power of the processors seems obvious.

Its not a huge deal, just wondering if anyone has seen this.

Is anyone using Sony Vegas with something like Parallels, Fusion.

Thanks
Lou

[Ben Winter]

Originally Posted by Lou Trottier

Hi everyone and thanks for reading.

I have just migrated to a 2.8 Mac Pro 8 core with 6 gigs of ram...I installed Windows XP pro SP2 on a 32 Gb Fat partition on my primary drive using bootcamp. I had difficulty installing Windows when trying to format the partition with a NFTS. It would not read my windows install disk if using NFTS. (weird)

I have XP up and running now but it only sees 2 gigs of ram....I understand that a limitation of XP is that it can only read 3 gigs but where is this other gig.

I am currently using Sony Vegas 8 and the extra gig would probably not make a huge difference, but every little bit helps.

I migrated away from core2 quad Pc with 3 gigs of ram to the Mac and I was rendering a small project in Vegas for a client last night and the Mac seems to render significantly faster than my PC did, even without the ram not being recognized....The power of the processors seems obvious.

Its not a huge deal, just wondering if anyone has seen this.

Is anyone using Sony Vegas with something like Parallels, Fusion.

Thanks
Lou

Actually the limitation is in fact 2 gigs. You can use the /3gb switch in the boot config but system resources will take most of that extra gig anyway, and when I used the switch it caused a host of stability problems in my system.

You can google "3gb switch" and read about it, as it's often misunderstood as to exactly what it does.

[Lou Trottier]

Originally Posted by Ben Winter

You can google "3gb switch" and read about it, as it's often misunderstood as to exactly what it does.

Thanks a bunch, makes sense. Does switching to Vista offer any advantages?

Lou

[Ben Winter]

Originally Posted by Lou Trottier

Thanks a bunch, makes sense. Does switching to Vista offer any advantages?

Lou

NO with a capital N and O! Vista is more buggy than XP, I've found, and the general consensus is that it's a disaster in it's current state and should be avoided until the kinks are worked out. Surely with all this consumer-friendly bloatware and hyper-sensitive security stuff installed it's a bugger to edit on. My recommendation is XP64. I've been pleasantly surprised by it; it uses all my 4 GBs, Premiere Pro runs very smoothly and I've had the least amount of crashes while using it (2 to 3 versus 10-20 easily using regular XP home/professional).

[Lou Trottier]

Thanks for the insight Ben,

are you working primarily on a Mac or a PC?

Lou

[Yossi Margolin]

For some reason, Bootcamp limits Windows to seeing only 2gb. Windows is able to see up to 4 gigs, depending on the hardware setup. (My Dell system sees 3 gigs of RAM)

[Bill Bradley]

Originally Posted by Lou Trottier

Hi everyone and thanks for reading.



Is anyone using Sony Vegas with something like Parallels, Fusion.

Thanks
Lou

I have used Vegas via Parallels. Worked reasonably well, I just go tired of keeping parallels and bootcamp in sync. Decided it was easier to just reboot, and use macdrive to move files back and forth as needed