Hi Guys and Gals,

Anyone know why CorelDraw X3 only recognizes 2.5Gb out of my total of 4Gb of RAM? I'm running Vista Home Basic, if that helps. I'm not having any problems, but it does bother me a bit. Any Ideas?

Thanks,

Paul

CorelDRAW Suite is a 32 bit application suite. As such, (and all other 32 bit applications) have a limit on the amount of RAM that can be addressed. That is about 3.2 Gigs (round numbers), but you also have a 32 bit Windows O/S, and it, too, has the same RAM addressing limitations.

So, your maximum memory is about 3.2 Gigs, minus what Vista (and associated services, etc.) needs, is what you see as 2.5 Gigs.

If you had a 64 bit Vista O/S, you could see slightly more memory for Corel, but Corel, is still a 32 bit application, and thus has a limited memory address ability.

 Thanks for the reply Hugh,

I can agree with your statement about Corel RAM support. That makes sense. But, I was running with the understanding that all versions of Vista 32/64bit support more than 2.5Gb of RAM. You are saying this is not true? Maybe I miss-read or misunderstood that about Vista. Hmmm, that was kinda the whole point of upgrading to Vista in the first place.

 Hi,

Did a little digging and from what I read, Vista 32bit does support up to 4Gb of RAM.

The 64 bit version of Vistya (and XP-64) do support more than 3.2 Gigs. Way more. But the restriction on Corel is that it still is a 32 bit suite and it has the limitation of 3.2 Gigs, internally, regardless of how much RAM you have under Vista-64. Bummer.

Perhaps, X5 could be a 64 bit application? Perhaps not, depending upon the adoption rate of 64 bit O/S (Vista and Windows 7). If CorelDRAW will be a 64 bit application, then you could use more memory......(File this under 'Wish List, Item....')

Actually, full addressing range is 0 - 4,294,967,295 (decimal),  0-FFFFFFFF (hexadecimal).

Windows requires some RAM for various items, hardware and software, which brings you back down. (Hardware has reserved some memory addresses, due to the PC hardware infrastructure, such as a memory window for VGA video, about 16 Megs, etc., - who uses VGA, these days? -)

Prior to Vista, the hardware limitation was 3.2 Gigs, but with the Vista Hardware Qualification, it is now above 4 Gigs, but Windows O/S (32 bit) is still limited by the 32 bit wide address scheme. Even at the 3 Gig limit, the higher memory address range was "negative" memory, as anthing above 31 bit address was considered a negative number......a goof, due to lack of foresight by the software developers. But that has been corrected in XP/Vista.