>... on my new Gateway FX530XV. I don't see what all the fuss is about. Specs are:
>
>Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme Quad-Core Processor QX6700 (2.66GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 2x4MB cache)
>4096MB 667MHz Dual-Channel DDR2 SDRAM (4-1024MB modules)
>1000GB 7200rpm Serial ATA II/300 hard drive w/ 16MB cache & Raid 0 (2-500GB hard drives)
>Gateway® 24" Widescreen High-Definition Performance LCD Display
>NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS w/ 320MB, Dual DVI-I Dual link TV Out (Factory Overclocked)
>
>Yes, I'm bragging <g>. This is a sweet machine.
>
>Incidentally, I only see 3.25GB of that 4GB memory because of the way 32-bit systems address memory. There is something called PAE that would allow me to see all of it, but NVidia doesn't support that. Even then, Vista 32-bit would only see 4GB max. The 4GB barrier (f.k.a. the 640K barrier) and 64-bit might be closer than we think.

The real question is, do your APPS run fine on the new machine?

BTW, be careful running RAID 0 (striping) on your hard drives. A single problem with either drive could render both drives unreadable. Much safer is RAID 1 (mirroring). RAID 0 can give higher performance for gaming, digital video/audio processing etc. but RAID 1 is probably a better choice for a business/dev machine.

I'm surprised your machine can't see a full 4GB RAM. I've just set up a couple of Dell SBS 2003 servers with 4GB and they see it all fine (PAE not required). With 32-bit Server 2003 the issue is the balance between address space for user programs and address space for the OS. By default it's 2GB each. For dedicated servers mainly running Exchange you can set a /3GB boot switch to force the OS to allocate 3GB for user space and 1GB for the OS. In the server world that's a major motivation for 64-bit, since a 32-bit Windows Server can really only offer 2GB RAM to user space.

So, I'm surprised 32-bit Vista would have the limitation you've outlined. Do you mean that Task Manager is reporting only 3.25GB physical RAM available? Your rig sounds like it's strong enough to be a serious gaming machine. Is it possible it's been configured with some sort of video buffer to enhance video performance for gaming? If so you might be able to turn that off to reclaim the RAM - check your BIOS options.