Virtual machine memory question

[TeK-FX]

I am currently attending a community college and I had a couple of questions regarding their computer setups. They are running Windows XP 32-Bit on Core-i7 machines with 8GB of ram. On these machines they are using a virtual machine running windows 7. My question is can the virtual machine be assigned and access the memory beyond the Windows XP 32 bit barrier? The virtual machines runs extremely slow with constant hangups until they catch up which can take forever. I was wondering if they were running out of their assigned amount of RAM leading them to have to use their swap files which in turn was slowing them down? If I am providing confusing info or not enough please let me know! Thank you for your time!

 

[/dev/null]

Does xp 32 support PAE? If so it can use > 4GB. With that being said I don't think XP supports PAE.

Any idea why they are using XP as a host? Are you sure they aren't using XP 64-bit ?

 

[TeK-FX]

I have no idea why they are using XP 32 bit as the main OS then having me boot into a virtual machine running Windows 7 64 bit. I checked the system properties and they have 3.25 GB usable for the XP OS.

I will do some research into PAE for WinXP and report back! Thanks for the reply.

 

[plugwash]

Does xp 32 support PAE? If so it can use > 4GB.

Unfortunately that is not the case. 32-bit desktop windows uses PAE mode (to get the security features mainly) but since XP SP2 the PAE support in desktop windows has been crippled so you can only use 4GB of physical address space.

MS claimed this crippling was due to buggy drivers, whether you believe them or not is up to you.

In XP SP2+ the crippling runs so deep it basically can't be disabled. In vista and win7 the crippling can be bypassed with kernel hacks but I wouldn't want to do it on anything other than a play machine..