Windows XP and 4GB memory limit

[Roberto]

Hello,

does anybody know if it is possible to override the 4GB limit of Windows XP and enable a RAM Drive that uses the memory beyond the 4GB limit ?
The idea is to set the VS working/smart-render folders to the RAM drive to speed up.

I searched through internet, but out of a lot of trash written by people who has no know-how at all about PC architectures, and out of not enough detailed Microsoft articles, I haven't figured out if it is possible or not, specially when the motherboard chipset and the CPU have 64-bit addresses.

I know that the best thing would be to switch to Windows 7, but 300 bucks for this software is not really cheap...

[Accolades]

NO

[Roberto]

What about the L3 cache ?
For 64-bit AMD processors & MB (in my case Phenon X4 955 and Gigabyte UD4) the L3 cache memory is taken from system memory: I used CPU-Z program and it looks like the all physical memory can be used for the L3 cache... (actually I do not remember exactly how much, I will check later on).
The L3 cache should be out of Windows management, only handled by the memory controller.

How to verify if it is really used and what's the benefit ?
Any suggestion about how to monitor how many times the L3 is accessed and and much the L3 memory can contribute to the system speed ?

Maybe the topic is just hardware related and not too much related to NLE, but I think it could be still interesting to discover whether some more memory above 4GB can improve the system speed even with Win XP pro...
...just for the record

[sjj1805]

You might do better asking about this at one of the
Microsoft Forums

[Roberto]

OK