Instructions on Unlocking More Than 2GB Ram on Windows 7 32-bit (May Work on Windows 8)

Did you know that Windows basically splits your RAM into RAM for apps and RAM for the kernel/system? Using bcdedit we can change the settings.

IMPORTANT: The following only applies to 32-bit users, not to 64-bit users. If you do not know the difference please stop here and do not attempt any of the tips below unless you are keen on learning and don’t care about crashing your system

32-bit Windows is a little limited because you can’t use 4GB RAM without some tweaks. We previously explained how to use 4GB RAM on that version here:

By default, Windows 32-bit uses a maximum of 2GB RAM for any single application even if you unlocked 4GB as explained above. However, you can change that by editing the boot loader using bcdedit. This is a common fix that can also help to fix games such as The Witcher 2 and Battlefield 3 who may use more than 2GB of RAM at certain times. Steps are listed as follows.

Step1: Open an elevated command prompt

Step2: Enter the following command
bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVA 3072

Step3: Reboot your PC.
Step4: You can confirm this by entering bdedit again and checking all values.

bcdedit

Step5: If you decide that this messes up your system RAM usage too much you can delete the option by entering:

bcdedit /deletevalue IncreaseUserVa

We haven’t tested it on Windows 8 32-bit, but it should work.

Please Note: Windows partitions the available 4GB of address space on a 32 bit system in half, so that the kernel get 2GB and the program gets 2GB (its virtualized so each program gets 2GB). The "bcedit /set IncreaseUserVA 3072" command changes the partitioning so that each program gets 3GB and kernel space only gets 1GB. Mostly this works fine, but as you noticed you can run into trouble. It is usually some driver that runs in kernel space that has been hard coded to assume it has 2GB of address space available that causes the problems when it attempt to use the 2GB of address space without bothering to check whether it can.