On occasion (=when there's a new game out that I want to play), I reboot the iMac into Windows. Since it was cheap, I upgraded to 16 gigs of RAM, and since the Windows is a 32-bit XP, it doesn't support that much - less than 4 gigs, in fact. On a hunch, I googled around to see if one could make use of that extra RAM for a cache somehow, and found references to something called Gavotte RAMdisk. Basically, it's a version of the RAMdisk MS shipped with XP hacked to live in memory over the 4GB limit. Supposedly one can put the pagefile there and in effect move XP to something similar to Mac OS X 10.3: Total RAM over 4gigs, but each process limited by the 32-bit limit (or even 3 gigs in the case of Windows).
Has anyone tried this? This Gavotte thing doesn't seem to have an official webpage, but it's easy enough to find.
And don't tell me to upgrade to Win 7. I'd need Home Premium x64 full version to make a notable difference, and I'm simply too cheap to upgrade based on the limited amount of time I use Windows on it.