Excess RAM

I have a Win7 32-bit system with 6GB of memory. The systems says 3.37GB is usable. Can I get Windows to use the whole 6GB of memory or if not can the excess memory be used for something?

If you switch to Windows 7 64 bit and you should be able to use all your RAM. 32 bit versions of windows are limited to a 4 gig address space for RAM.

Britton30 said:

Also, it's not a Windows issue, all 32 bit OS's can address only about 3.5GB of RAM.
A 64 bit OS is technically able to address way more RAM than any board can handle currently. Up the the Petabyte range, I think.

Windows memory limits:

Memory Limits for Windows Releases (Windows)

Win7 Ultimate X64 is limited to 192GB. I suppose that's an artificial limitation; the 64 bit address space could cover 1.8E19 bytes.

There are 32 bit server versions of Windows that can utilize 64GB of physical RAM if PAE is available (Physical Address Extension (Windows)). The memory limits on 32 bit applications would hold; you'd be able to have many 32 bit applications open simultaneously. There are hacks to enable PAE on the desktop operating systems, but I've never tried them.

Given the ready availability of drivers for Win7 X64, it wouldn't be sensible to mess with PAE (IMHO).

Thanks to all that replied.