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Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?
Carol Haynes:
A 32-bit operating system can address 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes of memory natively.
The 32-bit versions of Windows use PAE to extend the addressable memory on 32 bit systems.
Standard consumer 32-bit windows can therefore address the full 4Gb of installed memory BUT memory mapped devices (such as graphics cards) have to be included in the physical 4Gb limit so if you have a 512Mb graphics card you will lose 512Mb from your physical memory because the graphic card memory is mapped to take the place of the missing memory.
There are a number of memory mapped devices and so commonly Windows can only actually see up to 3.25Gb of installed memory - the other 0.75Gb being used for device mapped memory.
In consumer Windows products PAE is available as an option but MS disables it so that it doesn't actually do anything.
f0dder:
Carol hits pretty close, but is still not 100% spot on the sugar.
32bit OSes can address 4GB of memory just perfectly, and with PAE that 32bit address space can be mapped to a "oh, I can't remember the bit amount, but it's more than you'll see in a single supercomupter node in your lifetime". Before SP1 of XP, you could get the full 4GB physical memory, too. After SP1, an arbitrary limit was introduced: Windows would no longer let you access more than the first 4GB physical address space, even if this limit is insanely arbitrary. The official reason is that "drivers were too flakey, and too many 3rd party vendors ignored the HighPart of PHYSICALADDRESS structures"... which sounds a bit hollow to me, and most likely an excuse to get people to not run servers on non-server Windows versions.
But sure, morons like Creative have never been good at writing proper drivers, and there's been plenty of samples of people not supporting multi-CPU systems etc. So there definitely ARE 32bit drivers that won't work on systems with >32bit physical addresses. But PAE itself isn't a problem, it's enabled by default to take advantage of per-page no-execute :)
Anyway, if it hadn't been for my Vista Immersion experiment, I would have been a clean XP->Win7 user, and would have... mostly... loved it :)
40hz:
Keep us informed, 40!
-superboyac (November 06, 2009, 03:51 PM)
--- End quote ---
Actually, I'm doing something very different (for me) this time out.
For several years now, Microsoft has maintained that their products work best when used as a complete system. So this time I'm giving that suggestion a go. My current Windows 7 software setup is:
* Windows 7 Ultimate Edition
note: The only reason I own a copy of Ultimate was because I didn't have to pay for it.
* Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher)*
* Microsoft Project 2007
* Microsoft Visio 2007
* Internet Explorer 8
* Microsoft security Essentials
* Visual C++ Express 2008 and 2010 Beta
* No, I did not install PowerPoint. I have a real deep dislike for PowerPoint and everything related to it.
Add to that some of Microsoft's Web 2.0 offerings:
* Live Writer
* Live Mail
* Live MovieMaker
* Office Live
* SkyDrive
And that's pretty much it.
The only non-Microsoft products I've got installed (so far) are the following:
* Amaya
* CodeBlocks
* eNoteFile
* Filezilla
* Firefox
* Kompozer
* MyDefrag
* Notepad++
* PaintNET
* PaintShop Pro
* Storybook
* WriteMonkey
* yWriter
About the only thing I'm really missing (and debating about) is Revo Uninstaller. I'm going to make an effort to keep the number of installed 3rd-party products down and try to stick with Microsoft as much as possible.* That being said, I'm sure FARR is going to show up on that machine sooner or later.
(*Note: This may be a research project of sorts, but I don't intend to be a total masochist about it. Maybe I'll "wear the t-shit" - but I have no intentions of "drinking the KoolAid" if push comes to shove. :mrgreen:)
This above setup is wedded to a domain running on Windows Server 2003 Standard. I'd eventually like to go over to the new 2008-R2 server - but that will have to wait since I seriously doubt I'll have the money to build a 64-bit server any time soon.
A Windows Home Server is also something I'd like to add to the mix in the not too distant future.
So there you have it - 40Hz's "House that Mr. Bill Built."
Let's see if doing it (almost exclusively) Microsoft's way yields as much synergy as they'd lead us to believe.
And if it blows up - or gets nuked by some piece of malware...well...I'll still have my NIX/FLOSS setup (:up:), so it's not like it will be that big a deal for me if (when?) it does happen. :P
Gonna be an interesting year coming up. :Thmbsup:
4wd:
MS disables it in desktop editions because of any possible driver compatibility problems, (and you have to admit there are a lot of drivers that really shouldn't have seen the light of day).
Taken from Wikipediaw and paraphrased on MSDN:
Very basically, each process is still limited to 4GB because of the 32bit addresses, but the OS can use a processor control register to map that 4GB space above the 4GB. So process "A" might have it's 4GB virtual address space start in physical ram at 8GB, process "B" at 12GB, etc.
--- End quote ---
That implies that software doesn't specifically have to be written to use memory above 4GB, just be coded to be PAE friendly, (eg. various ramdisk drivers - this is probably a bad example but I'm sure f0dder will tell me if it is :P ), because the CPU will take care of where that process will run.
The point was: A 32bit OS can address more than the physical limitation of 2^32 if the OS chooses to, (barring hardware limitations). Thus it's an arbitrary limit imposed by the designer of the OS, eg. MS.
EDIT: Dang it! f0dder beat me again!
Carol Haynes:
The point was: A 32bit OS can address more than the physical limitation of 2^32 if the OS chooses to, (barring hardware limitations). Thus it's an arbitrary limit imposed by the designer of the OS, eg. MS.
-4wd (November 06, 2009, 07:51 PM)
--- End quote ---
Not really accurate - a 32-bit CPU and OS can only address 4Gb at any one time. You can use an offset to point to that 4Gb if you want to but, for example, when you are looking at the 4Gb starting at 64Gb you can't see the 4Gb at 16Gb.
The 32-bit OS isn't really addressing more than 4Gb it is just using some trickery to make it appear that way and the software has to collude in the trickery to make it all work.
Working on that principle you could go back to 16 (or even 8 bit) computers and get them to address terrabytes of RAM. Some did - in the early 80s I had an 8-bit BBC Micro extension running CP/M that had 128Kb of memory (when 64Kb was the maximum addressable space). In fact it was an early dual processor system - each running with its own RAM but distributing I/O and display functions between the CPUs.
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