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Under PAE, each process is still limited to a 4 GiB address space, but the total usable physical memory is extended beyond 4 GiB.

Unfortunately, PAE on Windows is a sad story. Unlike what the knowledge base said, in practice, you cannot use PAE for this purpose on Windows. Officially, PAE is only supported on Windows Server, and unusable on desktops.

Technically it's supported and almost always activated by Windows (since PAE is needed for the NX bit / DEP). But on desktop systems, Microsoft intentionally crippled PAE by locking the maximum memory to 4 GiB by a software license restriction [0]. Microsoft didn't do it because it wanted to force you to buy licenses, but due to compatibility problems, especially, all types of device drivers are problematic. Using more memory requires patching the kernel to bypass this license restriction, with unpredictable consequences due to incompatibilities.

TL;DR: PAE on Windows is practically useless.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Mic...