How To: Remove Windows 7 32bit 4GB Memory Limit

         If you are running a 32 bit Windows 7 and have 4GB or more ram installed on your system, you might already know Windows kernel(in traditional 32bit program architecture) has blocked out a good chunk of the memory into “hardware reserved” and thereby limiting your ram anywhere from 2.75GB to 3.5GB depending on your motherboard and chip set.

While many articles has been written to say that there is no way to remove this limitation, it is actually wrong. Here’s a hacked kernel from  a programmers group in Russia to correct the limitation. In fact this is a known problem according to Microsoft themselves as the special version of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter edition in 32bit supports up to 64GB of ram. Geoff Chappell, a software analyst commented on his article that 32bit editions of Vista all contain code for using physical memory above 4GB, it is just that Microsoft doesn’t license you to use that code.

So all you have to do now is download the file below, follow the instructions from unawave.de and you are done! The file might get detected as a trojan on some antivirus software, when that happens don’t panic as it is a false positive. Simply add the executable file to your antivirus exclusion list(or disable it temporarily) and you should be able to open the program fine.

  Windows 7 32bit 4GB Ram Patch (2.3 MiB, 30,472 hits)

Below are some images of my own system’s resource monitor and computer properties, I have been using the hack on both my home and office computers, so far there hasn’t been any issues. Gaming, photo editing, browsing and general applications work fine together, the extra RAM space does really shine in multi-tasking especially on some days when I have over 20 chrome windows(instances) with multiple extensions running.