This seems like an appropriate place to ask this question. At work I have an i5 with 8 GB of ram. Unfortunately we're stuck with XP 32. So is there a away for me to use more memory over all? Specifically I have to have Outlook and my VirtualBox Linux machine running at the same. I'd like to use bank switching or PAE to give my VM 4 GB. While all of the other applications just fight out for the remaining 4.
Technically, all modern Windows versions have PAE enabled (the NX bit requires enabling PAE for instance), but Windows adds license-based memory restrictions on top of that.
That's how the 2GB limit on Starter, the 4GB limit on non-server and the various limits on server editions are implemented.