Verily I say unto thee, that chrisv spake thusly:
> Subway steel wrote:
>> "chrisv" <chrisv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> news:tl5lc4l86ulbsv7ognonplgnkd84gv0hfe@xxxxxxxxxx
>>> Subway steel wrote:
>>>> A 32-bit OS is certainly able to handle 4 Gigs of memory.
>>>
>>> XP can use around 3.2, I believe. Is Vidsuh 32-bit better in
>>> that regard?
>>
>> Just like it does with 32-bit Linux
Not quite.
Windows support for PAE over 4GB is not standard on Desktop systems, and
requires *paying* huge amounts for enterprise products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Windows
Linux support for PAE up to 64GB is free.
Both systems have the same hardware requirements, however unlike under
Linux, the Windows driver model doesn't scale well, hence the limitation
on Windows Desktops. One could attribute that to apathy or greed ... or
more likely both.
Then there's Vista:
[quote]
In theory, a 32-bit operating system should be able to support 232 bytes
= 4GB memory. Thus the first reaction usually is that the memory chips
or with the mainboard has a hardware defect. Unfortunately, that’s not
the case. Vista can indeed address 4GB of memory. However, the maximum
amount of RAM that can be used by the system and applications is 3.12 GB.
The cause for this is the so-called memory-mapped I/O (MMIO). Some
devices need a dedicated space in memory. A typical example is a video
card that utilizes the system memory. Now, you might object that your
video card has its own memory and you didn’t install any additional
devices that could occupy so much RAM.
Well, for compatibility reasons Vista reserves memory for devices even
if they don’t exist in your computer. That means that if you have 4GB
RAM in your computer and Vista displays only 3.12 GB available memory,
about 1GB is indeed not used by the OS. You might as well remove it.
That is quite strange, isn’t it? I am not a system programmer, but for
me that seems to be a design error, probably one that is very old.
[/quote]
http://4sysops.com/archives/why-windows-vista-only-sees-3gb-memory-in-a-pc-with-4gb-ram-and-how-vista-sp1-fools-its-users/
>> The maximum addressable address space is 4 Gigs. Emphasis on
>> 'maximum' because in reality it's going to be lower.
On wasteful and bloated systems like Windows, certainly *much* lower.
> The point remains, once one jumps over 2G (typically to 4G), one
> starts to think "I should have a 64-bit OS to take advantage of
> this."
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| By bucking Microsoft for open source, says Gunderloy, "I'm no
| longer contributing to the eventual death of programming."
| ~ http://www.linux.com/feature/142083
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
05:33:59 up 28 days, 2:47, 4 users, load average: 0.02, 0.12, 0.40
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