Dear R-Users, as I will start a huge simulation in a few weeks, I am about to buy a new and fast PC. I have noticed, that the RAM has been the limiting factor in many of my calculations up to now (I had 2 GB in my "old" system, but Windows still used quite a lot of virtual memory), hence my new computer will have 4 GB of fast DDR2-800 RAM.
However, I know that 1.) Windows 32 bit cannot make use of more than about 3,2 GB RAM and 2.) it is normally not allowed to allocate more than 2 GB of RAM to one single application (at least under XP, I don't know if that has changed under Vista?). I remember from the R-FAQ that you can manually adjust XP so that it allocates up to 3 GB to one application ("the 3GB patch"), but I read in a PC-magazine and some message boards that this may cause problems. Does anybody of you successfully use this "trick" without any problems? Would it be wise to use a 64bit OS, as e.g. Vista X64? I think, under Vista X64 it should be no problem to allocate 4 GB of RAM to R. Any experiences with that? Thanks in advance, Ralph Wirth ----- Ralph Wirth University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Statistics GfK Group, Department of Methods and Product Development -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Problems-with-XP32-%223GB-patch%22---Worth-upgrading-to-Vista-X64--tp15040389p15040389.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.