Response regarding "crippled" 1st gen MacPro

Question

I'm curious to know if others have had this experience.
I purchase a 1st generation Mac Pro after significant amount of research in order to run Windows XP. I am a returning Mac user and bought the first laptop ever offered by Mac. I do not make my purchases lightly as I need them professionally.
I recently got the wherewithal to significantly upgrade my RAM, as had been my intention, and discovered the 32 bit limitation of Win XP not being able to see/use more than 4 gigs.
After consulting with my 3D Software Newsgroup, and with the pretty savvy technical person on this newsgroup whose lead I followed in going back to Mac, I was given the impression that there was some question as to whether I could get even the additional 2 gigs out of XP on my Mac (it came with 2 gigs).
I then spent the better part of a couple of hours on the phone with Mac Support who insisted that this was a limitation of XP and that I could do everything with my machine that I could do on a PC with XP. The support tech proceeded to mildly trash Microsoft for their OS as well as to blatantly state that I did not do my research when purchasing my machine.
Over and over I was told that I could do anything with this Mac that I could do on a PC and that I needed to consult Windows technical support. When I suggested that he was giving me Mac-legal answers and not helpful answers he said this was absolutely not the case and that I somehow was not listening, had not done my research etc.
I cannot imagine anyone being more deliberate than I was when making this purchase and researched it over roughly four months.
In addition to sending back my RAM and having Crucial send me out two additional gigs of RAM (because I should reasonably expect my MacPro to recognize this additional RAM) I am now, after a number of days on this support forum and elsewhere, coming to understand that I will not get my MacPro running XP to recognize any more than the 2 gigs that came with the machine.
This does not seem to me to be in line with what I have been getting told from Mac Support. i.e. I cannot do everything on my MacPro with XP that I can with a PC and that it is not the "fault" of Windows' software that I can't get the extra gigs out of the machine.
Eventually, I got back to the support person I was speaking to, after my having to research the issue further, and got this response:
"Thank you for waiting for our engineers to get back to us.
They stated that the issue is due to a limitation of the Microsoft operating system. They suggested consulting Microsoft for additional information or review the articles that both I provided."
These articles do not address the issue and I did not receive a response to my follow up email.
Are there others who need more than 2 gigs out of this machine that have had this experience?
Many Thanks,
Jonathan

Answer 1

I hate to burst your apple hating bubble, but the tech is 100% correct. This is not a mac pro issue, it's an XP limitation.
XP is limited to 4gb of addressable memory. By default, XP is configured to part out ram in a 1/1 ratio. In the case of 4gb of installed ram, this means XP will reserve 2gb for itself and only display 2gb of ram in system info.
There are boot.ini switches that change this ratio to 3/1. The result is you'll see ~3gb of ram and XP will reserve 1gb for itself.
The above statements are true for any hardware you choose to install XP on. Dell, HP, self built, ibm, and yes even Apple.
I have personally been successful using standard XP boot.ini hacks to show 3gb out of my 6 or so I had installed. As have others: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=251078
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=227135
Honestly, though, you get nil to no benefit from doing this as only applications that were especially compiled to use the extra 1gb are capable of doing so (almost none are). So even though you may get a warm fuzzy feeling from "seeing" the extra gigabyte, you likely won't get any performance increase from it.
If you want to utilize more ram than this, you'll need to install an operating system (windows or otherwise) that is capable of supporting it.
In case there is any ambiguity in the above statements let me clarify:
A) You are incorrect, the apple technician is correct
B) Apple did not cripple your hardware, you failed at due diligence before choosing XP for your main operating system
C) You can use your Mac Pro + Windows operating system with identical capabilities of any other hardware you might choose to purchase.
(oh, also make sure you install the ram in the correct slot order, it's kind of wacky depending on the number of modules you have due to the buffered dims)
Good luck
Oh, also, just to make note. I'm happily running Vista with 8gb of ram all visible and addressable. I think this is a fairly clear demonstration that the limitation is due to XP and not due to some fanciful "crippling" that Apple as done.
Message was edited by: James Kyle