Machines with 4GB RAM

Recently I have been looking at getting a laptop with 4GB RAM to run loads of virtual machines.

It looks like this is somewhat of a problem area! There are lots of posts out there about this subject but this one from MS sums it up nicely

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

 

Basically you won't be able to see the full 4GB RAM in Windows because of chipset limitations. The chipset has to map the top approx 700Mb for use by the PCI bus and devices on it.

 

To see the full 4GB you need a 64bit OS, compatible chipset and Bios and a 64bit CPU.