There is much confusion about memory allocation in Win XP Pro 32bit. I will address this in a future post. This one deals with setting the switch. If you have more than 2GB of ram in your machine you should try this method. If you have 2GB or less ram, try it also. It can allow XP Pro and some applications to allocate larger contiguous blocks of memory and improve performance. Some programs aren't code to take advantage of this so there will be no performance enhancement for them.

This will add the 3GB switch as a boot option. This gives you the most control in case a program you have doesn't like the switch. Just reboot and select the normal setting during start up.

1) Click Start. Right-click My Computer. Click Properties.

2) Click the Advanced tab.

3) In the Startup and Recovery section, click Settings button.

4) In the System Startup section, click the Edit button. Notepad will open with the boot.ini file opened.

5) There will be a line that looks like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Copy and paste it at the end of the same file. It should be on a new line. Add the switch to the end of the line. It should look similar to this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB Switch" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /3GB

6) Save the boot.ini file and close the editor.

7) Click OK button on the Startup and Recovery dialog.

8) In the Startup and Recovery section, click Settings button again.

9) In the System Startup section, click the drop-down list under Default operating system and click on the 3GB switch option. Click OK button.

10) Click OK to close the System Properties dialog box. Reboot the computer.

11) When you boot your computer, you will get a screen asking which config you wish to load. the first option is the default, ie. the one you selected in step 9.