i recently upgraded my PC to a full 3GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. the BIOS and Windows seem to be recognizing the memory alright. however, i'm not sure if any programs are utilizing the full 3GB. how can i be sure? for one, i've added the /3GB switch to the boot.ini. second, i've reduced the page file size to 2MB-512MB. but if i run a program like FSAutostart and utilize the memory defragmenter, it only sees 2GB of memory and fails to defrag and allocate memory blocks. am i missing something here? does FS9 not utilize any more than 2GB?

If you are running a 32 bit version of XP or Vista, then the OS will dole out 2 gig per process. So the FSX process can only use 2 gigs. With the /3GB switch, proccesses that use IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE in the header can use 3 gigs. I don't know if FSX has this set in the header.I have not heard of FSX using more than 2 gigs of memory, even on 64 bit machines. So 2 gigs might be enough.Oh crap...I just saw you were referring to FS9. I'm almost positive FS9 will not even approach 2 gigs...someone want to chime in on this?

If my memory serves me right, FS9 with all the trimmings bells and whistles except AI aircraft add-on plus Windows plus background stuff like anti virus is coming out at about 800 megabytes, the FSX plus all the other stuff is coming out at about 1.4 Gigabytes. A total 2 Gigabytes installed RAM seems to have defenite advantages over a total 1 Gigabyte RAM for a machine that would run FSX, as for FS9 I think 1.5 Gigabytes installed will do the job fine with plenty of head room. Best and Warm RegardsAdrian Wainer

Hi Adrian,I'll reserve my judgement on FSX max mem usage for a bit. I'm experimenting now with scaling some of the config file settings and watching CPU memory and GPU memory and I just went over 1.7 Gb of main memory usage. The last two items that I bumped were Buffer Pools to 10,000,000 and Autogen to Normal. The main memory increase may be a result of my 256 Mb Video card's memory overflowiing into main memeory. The last flight showed a maximum 1.7 Gb of main memory used and a maximum 322 Mb of video memory so an overflow did occur. I am using MemStatus 2.5 for the testing.R-

hey all, ok, I'm a bit lost here . . . where do you put the switch 'IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE'........I just installed 3gigs of 3200 and want to make sure I'm getting full use of it.Best,Clay

> where do you put the switch 'IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE'This is set within the application at compile time, so it not something you can change - either the application supports it or it doesn't.The only thing you can do is set the /3GB switch in your boot.ini file, details as follows:/3GB

Check out MemStatus...it will tell you exactly how much you are using during games, it will also show GPU ram usage:http://nuclearplayground.com/NuclearPlayground/

That's with my Athlon XP64 3200 754 Socket machine with a 6800GS AGP card with 512 megabytes on the graphics card, [ and 1.5 Gigabytes of RAM sticks on the motherboard ] so your point about Graphics card memory might well be a good one. Best and Warm RegardsAdrian Wainer

Or you could do very simple thing: disable swap and start loading whatever you can think of. See how far windows goes with MemStatus or TaskManager without telling you its out of memory (then it will crash obviously).