JD, On 22/07/10 10:25, John Doe wrote: > I was wondering if anyone would know the cons of running a PAE kernel...? > I have a 4GB pc and was wondering if it was worth going the PAE way to gain > those exta 700MB... You should use 64 bit if possible but if you're seeing 3.2GB, it's more likely that your motherboard is not capable (I have one of those here right now). > In the past, I heard that these 700MB were normally reserved for bios or chipset > stuff... It still is, even with with 64 bit. If your motherboard supports remapping this memory with 64 bit you can use the whole 4GB. Otherwise you're limited to 3.2: hakan at photon:~$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3262 1972 1290 0 103 737 -/+ buffers/cache: 1131 2131 Swap: 7812 308 7504 hakan at photon:~$ arch x86_64