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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects RAM problems — not being seen

  • RAM problems — not being seen

    Posted by Nicholas Toth on February 18, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    Hey guys, I don’t know where I should be posting this, so I figured I’d throw it in the AE forum. If anyone can re-direct me, that would be rad.

    So here’s the deal, we just got in a super pimp quad 3.0 macpro (w/4gigs of memory), we’re running bootcamp with XP PRO, but it won’t see anymore than 2 gigs of memory. We tried to re-write the boot.ini file, and it didn’t work — and I was wondering if anyone else has encountered a similar problem and successfully repaired it.

    Its really strange, in the control panel it says that we have 1.94 gigs installed, and AE says we have 2 gigs installed so Nucleo doesn’t complain about it.

    Anyone? I searched the COW and didn’t find anything.

    Nicholas Toth
    Freelance Animator
    nicholastoth.com

    Tim Kurkoski replied 19 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Delete

    February 18, 2007 at 7:26 pm

    It’s not that… Windows XP puts a cap on usable ram. My desktop has 4gigs of Ram, but XP only saw it as 2, too.
    Vista corrects this by putting the cap somewhere around 99Gigs of ram. It’s an old problem stemming from Microsoft’s planned obsolescence.

    http://www.xonikz.com

  • Nicholas Toth

    February 18, 2007 at 7:52 pm

    So — does this mean I’m using 4 gigs of ram or not?
    This is so friggin baffling.

  • Tim Kurkoski

    February 19, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    Windows is using 4 GB of RAM, but each application can only use a maximum of 2 GB. Like XONIKZ said, it’s a limitation built into the operating system. (The 64-bit versions of XP and Vista do not have the same restriction. The limit there for 32-bit apps like AE is 4 GB, which is the mathematical limit for a 32-bit memory addressing system. 64-bit apps can get up to 16 GB, I think.)

    You can hack the Windows Boot.ini file so that each app can get up to 3 GB. Do a search for “/3GB switch” on Microsoft’s site or Google. Be aware that using the /3GB switch has been known to cause stability issues. Your mileage may vary.

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