[{HVY-E}Jinxx]

Windows x32 will ONLY recognize up to 3.5gb of ram (The 4gb that people list Windows recognizing is due to the difference in acknowledged standards). What you are refering to is called shared video ram and depends on the BIOS, not Windows.
Certain proprietary MB BIOS' allow you to set a section of ram up to be used as video or shared ram. This is usually done to make up for the lack of ram on a mediocre proprietary video card.

You can use more than 3.5 gb of ram on a Win x32 system, but there is a trick to it. You use ram above the 3.5gb cap as a ram disk (virtual hard disk) and make Windows use this drive as your swap file. I used to do this with my XP x32 system and saw some performance gaines as Windows was using Memory for the swap instead of the hard disk.


Microsoft MSDN References can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/...S.85).aspx

Hope this clears things up for you.