Desktop memory question

My desktop has 8gb of ram. Under XP 64bit version, it was all recognized and available. But I dumped that version because I couldn't find the drivers I needed for some of my hardware and went back to the 32bit version of XP.

Now under that, only 3.24gb of ram is recognized...as expected.

So my question is this: Any way to reclaim that unused memory? Maybe by loading a DOS ram drive before loading XP? Any 3rd party memory managers? Any hacks? Any ideas?

What about you Windows 7 users? Is the driver situation any better for the 64bit version than it is for XP?

On Windows Server you can but it has a performance hit. No other hacks worth considering.
As I said when you started. 7 x64 is the only way to go. Unless you have really legacy hardware you'll be fine. If it's USB you may be able to get it going in Virtual PC.

Well you could always do what my uncle does: Keep x64 installed and always have an older computer running that supports your hardware. Use a VNC service to access the older computer and use whatever old drivers there were. Maybe you could have your old computer running with x86?

Try linux for cripes sake... Then run whatever Windows build you want via VM!

Virtual Machines don't always have access to serial or special hardware if I'm not mistaken. Just USB. We know you love Linux now but not everyone is willing to convert from what they are used to and what works directly with Legacy stuff.

I think you can use the rest as RAM disk on 32bit.

Yeah, using the PAE modification from Windows Server... but what do you do with it? You need a 6 GB page file on 4GB usable RAM, so unless you have 12 GB it rules that out (efficiently). After that you're storing temp files... well, big deal?

If you're doing video editing or large photo work you could use it as scratch space (but if you had the RAM available in the first place you wouldn't need to write into the scratch space in the same area).