for xp (my desktop) and vista (my laptop)...both are 32-bit

some of the forums are confusing...one person mentioned that he thought that all 64-bit processors included PAE by default since XP SP1, so it wasn't necessary...

[Edited on February 13, 2008 at 12:33 PM. Reason : .]

2/13/2008 12:13:41 PM

/3gb switch will allow the applications to simultaneously run up to 3gb of memory

PAE is in 64-bit processors, but the feature is limited in 32-bit server OS's, while it's in XP SP2 it's limited for NX only and doesn't work the same as the PAE in server versions of windows

so /3gb would be my answer (or both /3GB & /PAE)

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

[Edited on February 13, 2008 at 4:33 PM. Reason : .]

2/13/2008 4:20:42 PM

No version of windows XP supports physical address extension.

PAE is a function of intel CPUs that extends memory address space from 32 to 36 bits. In Windows XP, there is no way to give any 32-bit application more than 3 GB of memory space. The 64-bit addressing of 64-bit CPUs allows them to support a maximum of 16 Exabytes of RAM. XP 64-bit edition is software limited to 128 GB of RAM, but I don't know what kind of address space it provides to applications.

Neither of the first 2 posts in this thread seem to make any sense.

^^ What does the operating system have to do with the physical capabilities of the processor? Look up PAE. What is your actual question?

^ wat? Windows XP doesn't support PAE. SP2 on XP 32-bit enables PAE to support NX on capable processors, but still limits address space to 32 bits.

2/13/2008 5:38:26 PM

Quote :

"^ wat? Windows XP doesn't support PAE. SP2 on XP 32-bit enables PAE to support NX on capable processors, but still limits address space to 32 bits."

that's what i just said, hence why i specified SP2

[Edited on February 13, 2008 at 6:11 PM. Reason : .]

2/13/2008 6:07:53 PM