The computers at work run WinXP Pro, typically dual-core 2Ghz and 2GB RAM. I have an older version of Dragon Naturally Speaking (voice recognition) which runs fine on my PC but one of the other doc's has version 12 which is resource hungry.

I was thinking about ways to speed up the PC when using Dragon and one idea was an SSD. The downside is that if I swap it over, I'd have to configure the SSD to run on XP. Another option was to double the RAM to 4GB but IIRC WinXP can handle only 3.5GB of it.

So a third idea I've had is to install 4GB, leave 2GB for memory and then create a 2GB RAM drive for temporary files/pagefile/dragon's working space.

Would this work? Or would I still hit problems with memory addresses?
I once set up a RAM drive but that was back in the days of Win95/DOS.

4GB RAM available to XP should bring more than using the 2GB as a RAM disk.

I did wonder that since Windows caching should use the maximum RAM available before using the HDD. But WinXP IIRC won't be able to use all of the RAM.

Yeah, as you thought, 3.5Gb according to Google...

Isn't there a config switch you have to flip to make XP use more than 2GB? IIRC that was true unless you're using the 64 bit version, which was a lot harder to get hold of with XP that windows 7.

You could adjust the amount of memory the OS uses by taking some from the application area but PAE never worked on XP for remapping above 4GB by using a 36bit address space.
64bit XP was easy enough to get for companies but the lack of driver support meant few ever used it.

But the RAM disk is part of the OS, which means the 'missing' half gig won't be used by that either.

And that's exactly what I needed to know - would WinXP be able to address the extra memory or not. No point in creating a RAM disk if it won't address the extra memory.