Confused about 32bit Vista

[Elegy]

I'm planning to get 4Gb of memory in my laptop but I'm not quite sure how 32bit Vista addresses all this memory. I know there's a theoretical limit of 4Gb, so the user can only actually utilize around 3Gb since all the rest is allocated to the running of the OS.

If I have one machine with 3Gb of memory and another with 4Gb, I'll have around 3Gb of usable ram (in terms of games, programmes etc...) in both cases but am I right in assuming Vista itself will not eat up my usable memory as much if I have 4Gb because it will be using the user-inaccessible Gb of ram?

[$n][pErMan]

I have 4gigs of ram on Vista 32bit... it see's 2.93GB for me (because my video card has 768mb of ram which takes more of the addressing away from the ram. Anyway... Vista in general seems to run much better even though its only 32bit and the memory useage remained about the same as when I had 2gigs of memory (~800mb). Keep in mind the addressing takes into account video card memory and PCI memory. FOr the price of memory though I see no reason ATM to not get 4gigs of ram :) You will also have to force Vista 32bit to use more than 2gigs of memory along with many games. Easy to do though :)