I wonder if one can clean and wipe a hard drive with darik boot disk and then after the hard drive is zero'd I can install more ram without an operating system on board? Will the bios recognize the additional ram or should I update the ram first then wipe the drive?
its the hardware that detects the ram and the operating system detects the hardware(ram). you don't need to wipe it to install more ram. any new ram will be detected automatically. just turn off the pc stick in the ram carefully turn on pc and go into bios and you should see it report more memory then boot up the pc into your o/s and enjoy.
I plan on zeroing out my drive anyways so that being said and being done, what is automatically detecting the additional ram- the bios or the operating system? I'd prefer to zero out the hard drive then add the ram then reinstall the operating system. Hoping that's possible?
The BIOS will detect the new ram and thus then Windows will detect it too. As for your idea, yes you can do that though its not necessary.
From my earlier CS days, I believe that the BIOS detects the RAM amount and the Operating System allocates RAM (that is, it sets up the memory locations for each open application). Installation of RAM is independent of whatever Operating System is installed on a PC. Your MOBO determines how much RAM can be installed, not the Operating System.
True to a point. There is a roughly 4 gig limit for 32 bit OS`s. Unaware of a limit on 64 bit, other then the mobo\bios.
True to a point. There is a roughly 4 gig limit for 32 bit OS`s if the mobo will physically accept it and the bios will recognize it. Unaware of a limit on 64 bit, other then any imposed by the mobo\bios.
32bit will support 4 gig but 4 gig on 32bit will give you around 3 gig and not give you an accessible 4 gig. the rest will be reserved and mapped by your graphics card for pci-e. applications can only access 2 gig of it. the same goes for 32bit vista - to use all you have to use x64bit. if you have x64bit o/s and you upgrade to 4 gig you will only see 2 gig until you enable memory remap feature in the bios. to top it all off i upgraded a pc running x64 to 4 gig, enabled memory remap and it posted 4 gig. i then booted into the existing windows and it was showing 2.97 gig usable memory, in the end i reinstalled and it showed 4 gig. i had disabled a few services at the time so it been to do with these.
I can only relate my personal experience. I was running Win 2k with 4 gigs. 3.5 was shown in System Properties. My graphics card has 512 on board....in this instance your explanation seems sound. I had even enabled PAE in 2k with no difference in the amount of RAM shown. I then installed XP 64 with no other changes. The BIOS does have an "over 4 gig setting" which I had enabled when I installed the memory and left it enabled when installing XP 64. System Properties now shows 4 gigs. Side note; I multi=task the heck out of my AMD dual core rig. Neither core ever shows over a 50% load and my memory usage rarely goes over 20%. (sorry about the double post. must have hit submit instead of review after an edit)
One of the advantages with 64 bit if you have more than 4 gig ram,that there is no need of paging to disk because of the huge amount of memory so you can guess the gain in terms of accesstimes.
