From what I read in this forum and many others, apparently WinXP was not built to handle large amounts of ram. Well, upon trying to find a sweetspot for ram, I purchased a 1gb upgrade to my PC, which brought my total memory to 1.5GB. It installed fine, shows up in my system properties and on any diagnostic tools I run, be it benchmarks or firewalls. But as of this moment my PC is actually operating slower now than it did with just 512MB, the most noticeable problem being that I cannot start any PC games while WMP is playing MP3s, whereas I could do this pre-upgrade. Is there any way I can optimize WinXP so it will actually use my memory, or do I need to downgrade to 1GB or perhaps back to 512MB?

Windows XP Professional can handle up to 4GB RAM. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.

From what I read in this forum and many others, apparently WinXP was not built to handle large amounts of ram. Show us the links. As Sci-Guy pointed out, both XP Home & Pro are capable of handling up to 4GB of memory. Actually the handling of memory is based on the Intel 386 & later CPU chips. Read this primer on XP Virtual memory. i_XpUser

what is your pagefile set to? With this much ram set it to NONE and see if you get a performance jump you would expect. Might also look at your boot.ini and remove any maxmem switches you see. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

Try switching the sticks, put the new one in slot "0" and make sure the memory slots are dust free. Bob If you wake up to see the day - it can't be that bad.

Your computer should automatically start taking advantage of extra ram if it is showing up in the system. For virtual memory, do not set it to none. This will most likely degrade performance rather than increase it. Most programs need to store some portion of themselves in virtual memory when not in use. If you set it to no page file, you will most likely receive errors and XP will complain about it constantly, not to mention the decrease in performance. I have 2 gigs of RAM and I still have a page file. I tried doing what most people said, which was no/very little page file, but believe it or not, it caused tearing on my LCD along with other problems. Right now I have mine set to about 600, and it works just fine. I would try Bob’s suggestion make sure that the biggest stick is in the first slot, and the smaller one in the slot next to it. As for not being able to open a game and play MP3s I am not quite sure. You might try using a program such as Winamp instead. Do these problems go away if you take out one of the sticks? Do you know what your motherboard model and manufacturer are? Maybe it is some sort of problem with your bios version or something. Sorry I can’t help you more.