Bright Apollo's Journal: Ask Slashdot: 4Gb of RAM and now what?

I recently got my corp laptop refreshed with a Core Duo (not a Core 2, so no 64-bit goodness for me yet) and Win XP Pro. I also snuck a 4Gb RAM upgrade in there and it went through.

Unfortunately, Windows only sees 3Gb of it. Now, I do intend to run Ubuntu or SUSE on it as well, but my corp has some Win-only apps for which I need access (not the least of which is Outlook for Exchange Mail, and we live and die on Exchange so don't even suggest pulling up the email infrastructure of a $10b company). Is there any way I can utilize the other 1Gb of RAM on this machine if booted into Windows? What about VMWare (maybe running WinXP and Linux side-by-side)?

Finally, any good resources or pointers out there for optimizing a system to really leverage all this RAM?

-BA

Never mind

[Bright Apollo]

WinXP can use 4Gb of RAM; it splits into 2Gb of userspace and 2Gb of kernel space (!). I can add a /3GB switch to boot.ini to bump the userspace, but on my Dell D620 I would need to play with the /USERVA switch and allocate slightly less, as some drivers aren't loading and thus crashing the machine.

I'm not going with 3Gb of userspace anyway, as I don't have any apps currently looking for the extra headroom. And finally, virtual memory is still required (but I don't have it using 4Gb of it, either).

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