Question

I have 8gb of RAM, is there any specific configuration for the operating system take advantage of this large amount of memory? Note: OS -> Windows 7

Answer 1

Use 64 bits SO, it can handle more than 3.3GB RAM.

Answer 2

That's pretty much it. Beyond that, if you're not using memory intensive apps, you still get huge benefits because the OS will cache hard drive access in RAM, so repeat accesses won't hit the hard drive at all.

Answer 3

But remember, several gigabytes of ram alone will not bring tons of speed, the data is inicially on your hard drive so you need to quickly transfer it to you ram, that said, good hard drives, raid0, and large bus between ram->processos->disks is the way to give higher speeds.

Answer 4

Win7 ultimate 64bits supports up to 192GB of RAM.

Answer 5

First of all, you MUST have a 64bit processor. A 32bit will not adress all this memory, so you will always have a 4Gb maximum, even having 8Gb installed.

Then, use them on Dual Channel (or Triple Channel on i7 cores) and a 64bit processor. It should burst this amount of memory. Using dual channel, you will allow you to have 2x memory bandwitch, making your pc a lot faster. So, always use you memory in 2 cards or 3 cards (depending if you support dual or triple), equals. In your case, 4Gb in one slot and 4Gb in another.

Answer 6

Sorry, we're actually full of crap, as I just remembered. PAE -- Physical Address Extensions -- is a technology that's been around since 1995 and that allows 32-bit processors to access >4GB of memory. Windows, however, does not support it in 32-bit distributions because (wait for it) they want you to pay more for a version that does support it.

OS X has supported PAE since Apple switched to Intel, while Linux has supported it for some time as a compile-time option for the kernel (which is frequently on in distributions).