[Help] Do not enable PAE

[Camarade_Tux]

Yesterday, I searched some things on memory usage as shown in Task Manager.

On a page explaining the numbers show by this app, I read the on in "Commit Charge : Total" was the size of the virtual memory.

See this screenshot:

So I have 2.5GB of virtual memory though I only have a 512MB swap file. :/

2GB of physical RAM + 2.5GB of virtual memory makes 4.5GB. This needs PAE.

As I shown just before, PAE makes you loose some memory with pointers. Lost is around 1/3. A quick calculation shows that 4.5GB with PAE is just like 3.3GB without : 1.2GB difference!

This went so high because ONE day, ONE SINGLE day, I've used lots of memory and XP increased virtual memory size (which was stupid because I still had lots of free memory)

And now, the reason why this does not happened under XP SP1a : the install with XP SP1a is a sort of test. Moreover, I've been too lazy too install drivers so I don't use it and I windows never had any reason to increase VM size.

At least I now know that VM size is not resetted upon reboot.

Edited September 3, 2006 by Camarade_Tux

[Aegis]

I think you've done your caculations wrong. Virtual memory is the amount of physical memory and memory from the swap files combined. So if you have 2GB of RAM and a 512MB page file, then your virtual memory would be 2.5GB, exactly what Task Manager reported.

[Camarade_Tux]

If finally got rid of PAE.

Simple, stupid solution.

Edit boot.ini, add /KERNEL=ntkrnl.exe, reboot.

@Aegis, you were right.

[HyperHacker]

Nice.

BTW, did you guys mean your "System Idle Process" was using 16/28KB, or just "System"? Because the former on my computer is using zero while the latter uses 1,876K.

[cluberti]

The "Idle" process isn't exactly "idle" - things do actually run in the idle process (believe it or not), and the SYSTEM process is the representation of things running in kernel. That's actually a pretty low number for the SYSTEM process .

[HyperHacker]

OK, but why is mine so much higher than theirs?

[Camarade_Tux]

28/18KB is for "System Idle Process".

[cluberti]

Do you have any chipset or processor power monitoring software installed, like Intel's chipset application with a core single/duo or Pentium M, or AMD's powernow?

You could always take a look at the process with Process Explorer or dump it out with adplus to see what's running in there too.

[MyDyingBride]

(...)

I'll make a C app soon to check wether PAE is enabled or not : you just need to have a pointer and check if it's 32-bit or 64-bit.

(...)

sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about

on 32bit windows xp your application can never ever address more than 2^32 bytes of virtual memory without the use of special api functionality (awe api), because your logical addresses are still 32bit wide, so your pointer will always be 32bit wide - pae or not. however since those days when intel brought us the pentium pro, they added 4 bits to the physical (!) address, giving us 2^36 bytes of addressable physical memory (64GB). but besides the fact that even pae enabled xp is limited to 4GB of total physical memory, you have to keep in mind that the address translation process from 32bit virtual memory space to 36bit physical memory space is entirely handled by xp's memory management subsystem and therefore totally transparent to the user....

for more information on this topic you may review these sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platf...PAE/pae_os.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platf...PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

have fun