I'm building a new machine for our home use, and right now I want to run XP Home on it. I don't want to go Vista yet, because I always wait to upgrade Microsoft operating systems until the first service pack comes out.

But here's my question--in anticipation of one day upgrading to Vista, I would like to go ahead and put 4GB of ram in my machine now (4GB, I've heard, is Vista's "sweet spot"). I know that in XP some of this would be wasted due to the 32-bit limitations, so here's my question:

If I go ahead and put 4GB in (my motherboard can handle up to 16MB), is that potentially harmful, or is it just wasteful? It's pretty high quality RAM I'm looking at (OCZ Reaper HPC Edition DDR2 Dual Channel) with some nice cooling features, but I just want to make sure that running with that much memory isn't going to mess things up, either physically or virtually. I'm pretty confident when it comes to hardware issues, but this 32bit/64bit software stuff is out of my comfort zone.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I forgot to mention that I got a really good deal on 4GB, and I'm just wondering if I should put it all in, or sell 2GB on eBay and wait until I upgrade to Vista to put another 2GB in.

I'd be curious to know if anyone else has 4GB in an XP environment and if you've noticed anything at all (for example, is there any measurable difference between 2GB and the effective 3GB you get with the limitation?).

Thanks again.

I put 4 gig ram in my XP box and it ran fine. The thing is it will only use 3 gig of it. Hope this helps.

It will not harm it to use 4 gig. If they are matched, I would just keep it until you get Vista and then it would be more utilized in that OS.