Question about ram and fsx

List your system specs and operating system Chief.

Usually these performance problems would be more related to CPU or Video card power than RAM unless you are low on memory.

The sim will access whatever memory is available as it needs it just like any other application. If there isn't enough, it will use Windows virtual memory.

Is all your memory recognized by Windows?

8800
350gb harddrive
4 gb of ram
Need to know anymore?

Thing is when I go and look on like my comp to see what my ram is it says I have 2 but I know I have 4 in there. When I start up my comp I press f4 I think it is and it also tells your system specs and it says I have 4 gb of ram.

press start, go to search and type 'dxdiag', that will give you everything you would want to know.Also 8800...?and processor.You can also take advantage of your hard drive by increasing your pagefile space.(usually windows does this automatic, but you can change it to a desired size)
Also a question, if you have different types of ram installed?

A 32 bit OS won't recognize all 4 gigs.

Yes I do have 2 dif. types of ram isntalled.

O.k. do you have 4 slots or 2?

4 slots each with 1 gb of ram.

thought so...make sure that one type of ram is in slot 1 and 3, and the second is on 2 and 4.

Here is something from the MSKB that might help to explain how memory is allocated in Windows.

But basically you should be seeing Windows recognize 3.5 gigs of your four gigs of memory.
Any application would be able to use 2 gigs.

But this may not be your problem.
Which CPU?
Is 8800 your video card?
What types of memory do you have, they may not be compatible?
What kinds of performance problems are you having?

RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff
View products that this article applies to.
Author: Bruce Sanderson MVP
Community Solutions Content Disclaimer
Article ID : 555223
Last Review : December 12, 2004
Revision : 1.0
SUMMARY
Basic information about the Virtual Memory implementation in 32 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, 2003 Server etc.
MORE INFORMATION
In modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly.

Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system.

An expanded version of this article is available at http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/WindowsGeneralWeb/RAMVirtualMemoryPageFileEtc.htm

Processes and Address Spaces

All processes (e.g. application executables) running under 32 bit Windows gets virtual memory addresses (a Virtual Address Space) going from 0 to 4,294,967,295 (2*32-1 = 4 GB), no matter how much RAM is actually installed on the computer.

In the default Windows OS configuration, 2 GB of this virtual address space are designated for each process’ private use and the other 2 GB are shared between all processes and the operating system. Normally, applications (e.g. Notepad, Word, Excel, Acrobat Reader) use only a small fraction of the 2GB of private address space. The operating system only assigns RAM page frames to virtual memory pages that are in use.

Physical Address Extension (PAE) is the feature of the Intel 32 bit architecture that expands the physical memory (RAM) address to 36 bits (see KB articles 268363 and 26198😎. PAE does not change the size of the virtual address space, which remains at 4 GB, just the amount of actual RAM that can be addressed by the processor.

The translation between the 32 bit virtual memory address used by the code running in a process and the 36 bit RAM address is handled automatically and transparently by the computer hardware according to translation tables maintained by the operating system. Any virtual memory page (32 bit address) can be associated with any physical RAM page (36 bit address).

Here's a list of how much RAM the various Windows versions and editions support (as of Nov 2004):

Windows NT 4.0: 4 GB
Windows 2000 Professional: 4 GB
Windows 2000 Standard Server: 4 GB
Windows 2000 Advanced Server: 8GB
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server: 32GB
Windows XP Professional: 4 GB
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition: 2 GB
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition: 4 GB
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition: 32 GB
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition: 64 GB

The easy way to test your ram is to only put 1gig of ram in at a time and see if your pc recongnize's it, that way you will know if your ram is working.
I had this problem last year when i upgraded from 1gig to 3 gig, my pc said i only had 2 gig. One of my 1 gig of ram was faulty it only said i had 28mb of ram, when i tested it on it's own.It was new from PC WORLD but they changed it for me and now i have 3 gig.

ok thanks for all help. Yes 8800 is my video card also the ram I bought is comp. I took it asked, and called around to make sure it is. And to see other people remakrs and comments on fsx after sp2 and what their specs are it seems that I should be seeing way more of a difference but I am not. I also put the ram in 1 and 3 slots but it says on my comp I have 2.87 gb of ram.