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hhheng

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Can WinME address up to 2.0gb RAM

Some says Win9x see only up to 512MB RAM, the rest is not recognised eventhought it's shown in the system properties.
Can WinMe address up to 2.0gb of RAM ?
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macme450

I don't think so because this is a power feature supported only in Win 2000 & Win NT
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Lee W, MVP
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Were you planning on getting 2GB for your WinME system?  If you're doing something that needs that kind of RAM in a Win system, go with 2000.
In theory it does since the address space for Windows is 4GB but there is a big problem on Win9x/ME.  That is that ALL the resources must fit into 128K (that's K not M) of RAM.  This is a serious limitation and the reason why you get the dreaded "Out of memory" or "Low on resources" messages even when megabytes of RAM are really available.  

It's an architectural "sacrifice" to keep the high level of 16-bit/DOS compatibility in the Win9x family.  Windows NT/2000/XP discard this level of compatibilty but have the benefit of having their resources limited only by the amount of virtual space on the system.

So the bottom line is you can probably get WinME to recognize all or most of your 2G but the chances of being able to use more than about 256MB effectively are slim.
some article claim that if you will have problem have more than 512 MB of memory in your win me system. But theoritically, you can have that much of ram on a single machine. Assuming that you have 3 t 4 slots of DIMM slots on your mobo, and the most you can ge is a single piece of 256 MB ram, that only adds up to approx 1GB.

By the way like jhance has said, windows would not effectively using up all your memory that are more than 256MB.  
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ASKER

I read the articles from microsoft support link as mentioned by Leew. Win9x can address up to 3/4gb of RAM and this fact also affirmed by Jhance,the motherboard expert. So it's not advisible to use more than 512MB but safer to use 256MB as I understand from Jhance / Kahlean otherwise use Win2000 as Maqarity suggested if using 2gb RAM.

Thanks to everybody for your input.