As part of creating a super all-in-one source of data for our CMDB, I have built an inventory to determine if a Windows server is configured for PAE. PAE allows applications to address more than 4 GB of physical memory. When PAE is enabled, the operating system uses three-level linear address translation rather than two-level. Providing more physical memory to an application reduces the need to swap memory to the page file and increase performance. See this Microsoft article for more information about PAE: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx
Attached are a .wse, .exe, and .nsi (each were renamed to append a .txt to the end to be uploaded, so you will need to remove the .txt from them). The script checks for the existence of C:\boot.ini and parses the lines of that file looking for the string "PAE". Once found it will populate the nsi with a yes or no and send it up to the NS, as specified in the registry, using the native C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\AeXNSInvCollector.exe.
After having deployed this, I found more information regarding PAE. There is actually a WMI table called Win32_OperatingSystem, and the boolean value for PAEEnabled exists within that table. It is either True or False. So I simply used the native inventory solution tools (aexinvbuilder.exe) to build a custom inventory to perform that WMI query instead. I did a quick search and found this article about that utility on Connect if you need more information on how to use it: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/downloads/altiris-custinv-builder
Thank you.