My main Media Center machine is a beefy box, or at least it used to be; it is made up of:
Tyan Thunder i7525 (S2676)
2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor 3.0 Ghz /w EMT64 and HyperThreading
5 x 750GB (3.75TB) Seagate SATA II
Areca 16 Port SATA-II to PCI-X
2x512MB (1GB) PC2-3200 DDR2 ECC Registered
When you look at that configuration the thing that I that should jump out is that there was only 1GB of RAM, that’s because by the time I put everything else in I was broke ;).
It’s also because for what I was doing I really did not need any more memory but like all that’s that passed, as I started adding on software and trying thinks like Transcode360 I needed more memory so today on CraigsList I found a guy who was selling some pulled 1GB Registered ECC sticks and was willing to take $100 for 4, that’s a great deal as I have been trying to get a pair of the same speced chip on ebay for months for around $80 but I ended up getting 2x that for $20 more which is just awesome.
Thing is I knew I was going to end up with 1GB more than was addressable in a 32-bit install of VISTA but at that price I couldn’t pass it up, worse case I could sell off my 2x512MB chips and re-coup some of the costs.
In any event I raced home and installed them, verified the bios saw all 5GB booted off into Windows and saw a measly 3199MB available, then I remembered that there are other restrictions at play other than the 32-bit Barrier; Hilton Locke has a good post on this over at his MSDN blog.
In my case I am pretty sure if I were to do a fresh install of 64-bit VISTA I would get to see all the memory but My Movies wouldn’t work, not that its Brian’s fault as Microsoft didn’t include Jet in 64bit VISTA and migrating to SQL Express will take extra work not worth while in the 2.30 release.
Well just thought I would share my results, now to decide if I should wait for My Movies to support 64 bit or sell of those two 512MB chips on ebay J