Lightroom and Vista....Any workaround for memory? - Cause it's slow

Question

I've searched all over for a soution.   I can not tolerate the lack of responsiveness that Lightroom 3 has when it comes to working on my RAW files.   Here's my system info...bear in mind that I was working on 1 NEF file
Lightroom version: 3.0 [677000]
Operating system: Windows Vista Home Edition Service Pack 2 (Build 6002)
Version: 6.0 [6002]
Application architecture: x86
System architecture: x86
Physical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 2.6 GHz
Built-in memory: 3070.5 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 716.8 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 993.1 MB (138.5%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 1115.8 MB
Memory cache size: 0.0 MB
System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
That's a quad core with 3GB of memory however, Vista only makes 700mb of memory available for lightroom and as you can see, processiong one raw file puts me at over the allocated memory.   Lightroom 3 System requirements call for 2MB of available RAM.  I surpass that but the system requirements don't seem to take into account the Vista memory allocation issue.
Is there a way, that anyone is aware of, to allocate more memory to lightroom 3?  I can not work at this pace.  I can't even export the processed image as a full size jpg because I get the "not enough memory" error message in lightroom.   I disable all uneeded processes when running lightroom by the way which includes turning off anti-virus.  I usually have my laptop running on the corner of my desk in the event I need to look something up on the web.
This has become unusable in this current state.  Is this a Vista flaw, a lightroom flaw or a combination of both.  Is anyone aware of a workaround to this issue? 
Thanks to all that respond.
Fulvio

Answer 1

As stated elsethread, 32-bit Windows operating systems can address 4Gb of memory.  In general, out of the box installs will allow user processes 2Gb of that.  So Lr has access to 2Gb for the static application and for the memory it uses at run time. This 2Gb also has to be shared by other processes, so the OS provides virtual memory to let applications grow as necessary, up to that 4Gb limit.
There are tricks for giving user processes more memory, but there is often a trade-off because of the way Windows segments this memory. One of the trade-offs is that access to the other chunk of memory is much slower, though not as slow as paging. There are other gotchas, too.
What other processes are using up real memory?  Which ones demand to be paged in from virtual memory (which could slow down other applications like Lr)?
So, Lr will use memory if the memory manager can give it memory, but it really has to take what it gets.  And some operations are memory intensive, especially on larger raw files.  If the memory Lr is using is being paged, it can result in perceptually slow application performance.
I'd start with firing up Vista with very little running.  Exit all user applications, and kill services you don't need when working with photos, like real-time anti-virus protection (most of which are nothing more than a panacea that eat up resources and slow down the entire OS) and the search index stuff (which is basically broken until Windows 7) and stuff like that.
Make sure you make a large raw cache, and put the raw cache on a fast disk that is not the same as the one where your previews are. Buy a cheap drive and format it NTFS just for this purpose, if you have to.  Disk space is cheap, and it can act as a backup for your photos on import. Get rid of all the video/sound/whatever driver cruft that is not the just the drivers. nVidia, et al, love to install toolbar cruft that gives you nothing except higher CPU and memory usage.  You might want to create a new user account that is as clean a possible with all this stuff disabled or removed.
Lr /can/ work ok in a limited 32-bit environment, but you might have to tune the system a little.