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Notebook Makers Moving to 4 GB Memory As Standard
akintayo writes "Digitimes reports that first-tier notebook manufacturers are increasing the standard installed memory from the current 1 GB to 4GB. They claim the move is an attempt to shore up the costs of DRAM chips, which are currently depressed because of a glut in market. The glut is supposedly due to increased manufacturing capacity and the slow adoption of Microsoft's Vista operating system. The proposed move is especially interesting, given that 32-bit Vista and XP cannot access 4 GB of memory. They have a practical 3.1 — 3.3 GB limit. With Vista SP1 it seems that Microsoft has decided to fix the problem by reporting the installed memory rather than the available memory."
From the summary: "They claim the move is an attempt to shore up the costs of DRAM chips, which are currently depressed because of a glut in market."
The article says: "While first-tier notebook vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Toshiba are planning to roll out 4GB notebooks starting from the first quarter of 2008, the move is expected to give a boost to the DRAM market, according to memory module makers."
The article does not say that this is a deliberate attempt to increase DRAM price. And if it was, wouldn't it be illegal?
In boot.ini file add switch /PAE at the end of multi(0)disk.. line
/noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer /PAE
:)
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional"
It will not solve Your PR problem nor will solve the problem with incorrect reporting of available RAM, but will allow 32-bit Windows XP Professional to use all of it. In my experience, most programs / games can't use all 4GB of RAM, but if user is running more than one RAM hungry application (multitasks), 4GBs becomes useful.
Also we have to think about future Vista service packs so, 4GB is must have
Or at least, supervision by people who know how computers work? 4GB is perfectly sensible for a 32-bit x86; the virtual address space is only 4GB, but the physical address spaces is larger (at least 36 bits on all popular processors). Yes, that means it's awkward to use more than 4GB in a single application, but so what? Using more than 4GB across the system is perfectly transparent.
Also, what's with slamming Microsoft over the "slow" transition to 64-bit? 64-bit XP has been out for, like, three years now. It runs 32-bit applications, because the x64 architecture makes it so ridiculously easy you'd have to intentionally break it. 64-bit Linux does the same, because it takes, like, a line of code to do so. If software makers aren't producing 32-bit apps, it's probably because their customers haven't demanded they do so yet; and the customers probably haven't demanded it because it's unusual for a single application to need 4GB of RAM. Finally, those applications that can frequently use gigondo amounts of RAM in a single virtual address space (e.g., Oracle) for the most part had 64-bit binaries available right out of the gate.
He may not have said it, but he believed it;
Bill Gates Challenges and Strategy Memo (16 May 1991)
I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within--oh five or six years people were complaining."I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
That's not such a good idea.
The reason PAE mode isn't enabled by default is because it conflicts with DMA. Enabling it may make your Windows system even more unstable.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Uh, what?
Running a 64-bit OS, you can access the board's maximum (there aren't any boards that can max out the 40 or 48-bit address space of existing EM64T/AMD64 CPUs) memory.
Running a 32-bit non-Windows OS with PAE enabled, you can access up to 16 GiB (2^36 bytes) of physical RAM.
Running a 32-bit Windows server OS with PAE enabled, you can also access up to 16 GiB of RAM.
However, even with PAE enabled, Windows XP and Vista 32-bit won't let you access anything past 4 GiB, because of some legacy hardware that could barf if it were handed an address higher than 4 GiB.
Windows 32-bit operating systems really do not play well with more than 3Gb of memory. Check out what Microsoft says about it.
The address space you'd normally use to address memory beyond 3.5gigs (or thereabouts) is reassigned for talking to other stuff. It's a simple 32bit limitation - can't only be talking to the RAM after all. As others have pointed out throughout this thread, the problem does not exist in 64bit architectures.
5 years ago, nobody would have thought that we'd run into this problem at all. Remember those times? Everybody and their mum was just about getting ready to jump onto the 64Bit bandwagon with AMD charging in front. And then, while nobody (especially not AMD) was paying attention, we kinda veered off-course into a multi-core world instead and all of a sudden, people stopped caring about 64bit. After all, you had a larger net performance gain from upgrading to 2 32Bit cores than to one 64Bit one. And now, we're finally running out of address space.
The trouble is that in contemporary chipsets in 32-bit mode the upper 1G or so of physical memory overlaps with the address space for the PCI bus.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
I don't care about userspace drivers (I'm porting FUSE to Windows in my spare time, for God's sake!).
But Vista requires _signed_ _kernel-mode_ _drivers_. It won't load unsigned drivers, and there's NO user override for this 'feature'. Let me repeat: Microsoft does not allow you to run some types of code on your computer.
You can turn on 'test certificate root' which allows to use self-signed certificate, but it is hard to do for a common user, causes DRMed content to stop playing and displays 'test mode' icon.
32-bit OSes can't reach 2^32 bits of memory due to hardware IO ranges. Duh.
So why didn't you install 64-bit Ubuntu? Flash works'n'everything in 7.10 64-bit. VMware? They have 64-bit builds. Everything else I run is FOSS. There is no reason not to install it, AFAICT!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.