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OEM Windows 7 License Sales End This Friday
colinneagle writes This Friday is Halloween, but if you try to buy a PC with Windows 7 pre-loaded after that, you're going to get a rock instead of a treat. Microsoft will stop selling Windows 7 licenses to OEMs after this Friday and you will only be able to buy a machine with Windows 8.1. The good news is that business/enterprise customers will still be able to order PCs 'downgraded' to Windows 7 Professional. Microsoft has not set an end date for when it will cut off Windows 7 Professional to OEMs, but it will likely be a while. This all fits in with typical Microsoft timing. Microsoft usually pulls OEM supply of an OS a year after it removes it from retail. Microsoft cut off the retail supply of Windows 7 in October of last year, although some retailers still have some remaining stock left. If the analytics from Steam are any indicator, Windows 8 is slowly working its way into the American public, but mostly as a Windows XP replacement. Windows 7, both 32-bit and 64-bit, account for 59% of their user base. Windows 8 and 8.1 account for 28%, while XP has dwindled to 4%.
Windows 7 64 bit
I think Windows 7 is going to be the last Microsoft OS I'm going to buy. Linux is free. Hell, even OSX is free. Yet MS wants to keep gouging customers $100+. Uhm, no thanks.
Especially since you can use the Safe Boot > Repair Computer > and this batch file to have "unlimited" time to "register"
Microsoft doens't want Windows 7 to become the next Windows XP and denying them years of upgrade revenues.
Because I will NEVER use your windows 8 junk on a desktop. I gave it a fair chance, 2 weeks of uses and it was 2 week of utter shit.
Well we can start with the memory limit. I'd only be able to use 1/4 of the RAM in my laptop if I had the 32 bit edition of Win7.
Sauce: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-c...
I run virtual machines, large development systems, etc. This likes to have more then 3.5GB of memory to allocate. Thus 64bit.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you want to run Windows on a 4GB system, be my guess. But you need a 64-bit OS to see more than 4GB of RAM. Most motherboards can run 16GB or 32GB.
Man, I'm sad to see this go. Even the Extended Support will end in January 2020 which comes sooner than we know. Yes, Windows 10 is bringing the classic desktop back, but it seems that it is becoming a unelegant mishmash of Modern UI widgets and classic Windows widgets. I guess it's back to Linux-land, the place where I camped during the whole Windows XP era.
If it wasn't a big deal, why did Ballmer get handed his balls and Microsoft shift direction and at least partially restore the Start menu, with plans to bring it back it completely in the next version?
I'd say it was a very big deal, a very big deal that hurt Microsoft's image.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you change the OS and the manufacturer finds out it is possible that they will not honor the warranty seems like a good reason to not touch the pre-installed OS. Especially when you factor in the system recovery will put said OS right back (assuming you didn't kill that partition during the install of the alternate OS).
Then you open the can of worms that is drivers, quite a few Windows 8 machines lack drivers for win 7 and previous (then again makes a good argument for switching the users to Linux).
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram. These days most new PC's come with 8GB as standard, and some even 16GB.
That's the big reason to move to 64 bit.
You just listed all the reasons why they should stop developing 32-bit.
I'm shocked to see such a comment from someone with a four digit UID. Maybe today the difference between 32 and 64 bit isn't obvious, but Window 3.x, a 16 bit OS, didn't become unusable immediately following the release of NT4 and 95, but could you imagine trying to use 3.x in, say, 2004?
Remember, no one needed more than 640k of ram at one time, either.
Posts like this are why we need a "+1 Stupid but funny" option. This comment is so ridiculously uninformed that modding it up makes no scene, but it is enjoyable simply for its stupidity.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Are you trolling or what?
If you have a single process that needs to use more than 1.6 - 2.0 GB of memory ... you need the 64 bit version. And on top of that, if you've got 4 GB of memory the OS can use about 3 GB (total) due to the way Windows handles things.
The vaunted promise that 'things will run better and faster'
Who made that promise? I don't recall ever seeing that.
I recently upgraded my main gaming PC to 8.1 after a rebuild and I don't get all the bitching. It boots a lot faster than Win7, performs just as good (if not better), and the UI differences seem pretty trivial to me. I had gotten used to any changes within an hour. And I like that Security Essentials is now built in and doesn't even require a separate download anymore.
Maybe 8.0 was really godawful or something. But I had no trouble at all going from 7 to 8.1.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Has no one here ever heard of Classic Shell? That should the absolute first software you put on a fresh Windows 8 install.... www.classicshell.net
My Windows XP 64-bit SP1 (AKA server 2003 without the server tools) still works perfectly fine. While I don't have dx11, I'm not going to drop $100 on the rest of the horseshit that is Windows.
For all those who herp-a-derp about viruses and whatever. Only a fool would use a windows machine on the internet.
They must forfeit all privileges granted by copyright and patent law to allow others to pick up.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wonder how many other benefits it brings?
Are the 64 bit registers and arithmetic used often, or would that have more of a scientific number crunching (corporate) application than anything else?
Or can they sometimes cram two 32 bit numbers in a register and process a 32-bit program twice as fast?
I assume that that 64-bit opens up a lot of extra room for processor commands. Do they use more commands making bitcode more succinct and faster?
And of course it would make them quicker to execute as more data can be crammed into a single word (The Word length would go up to match the number of bits, I assume. I think I remember working with 32 bit words in univ, so that makes sense)?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Well over half the Steam hardware survey's machines have 4GB or more. A 32-bit OS means you can't actually leverage that amount.
Quick!! Let's buy some extra licenses now before it's too late!
:-/
Oh wait...
Never mind, we switched to Linux a long time ago already
I am not really here right now.
There is no earthly benefit to running Windows as 64bit
How about 16Gb+ RAM in ArcGIS or AutoCAD? You quite literally don't know what the fuck you are blabbering about.
There is a war going on for your mind.
To OEMs
But won't the OEMs stock up on Win7 (especially if they sell to the business market.)
I can tolerate the Windows 8 UI on the desktop. It's the huge push towards cloud services for everything that I really dislike. I can see it now. Bundle and save! Get Windows, Office365, OneDrive, Skype, and XBox Music for the low monthly price of $XX. It's like triple play services for your computer and you'll get to pick from 3 competitors; Apple, Google, Microsoft. Of course all the pricing will be eerily similar even though they're "competing".
I find it hard to believe that there's this big mass of home users out there who
1. Have a problem with pre-installed Windows 8.
and
2. Use only the pre-installed OS on the PCs they buy.
If 1, then why 2? If 2, then why 1?
Well, installing a different OS is a reasonable thing to do if you're relatively competent, but why would you pay the Microsoft tax once when you buy the machine, and then pay it again to install a different OS?
I have a friend who's wife has an architecture business. She does most of her work on the laptop (Windows 7). The laptop hard drive failed, so she decided it was time to upgrade, bought a Dell. Tried to work with Windows 8 for awhile, and sent the laptop back. Customer service was apologetic and understanding. (I wasn't there at the time, but I do wonder why they didn't just offer to ship a machine with Windows 7.) She made the decision to fix her old laptop. I helped her husband install a solid state drive and get the machine back up again. She's back online on Windows 7. Hopefully, by the time she's forced to upgrade, there will be something reasonable to upgrade to.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I can appreciate that, for a gaming machine. My PC is my main workstation, on which I do a variety of stuff, sometimes all at the same time, and the Windows 8 gui was not worth the aggravation. But for games, sure. I bet most of your games will fit on one page of the start screen. If Windows is concentrating on being a gaming platform, then maybe it's time for business customers to look for something else.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are times when you don't have a choice, but then, I agree, XP is a good solution. Or the XP emulation built into 7 Pro.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Microsoft charges for upgrades which Apple does not. Over long run, this adds up to the cost of machine for customers. For MS, this is costly too as it has to maintain multiple versions of Windows. I think, microsoft should have option of unlimited upgrade either as a single charge or a reasonable subscription service. That will keep most customers (at least premium customers) up to date all the time.
Windows 7 will be a around for a very long time.. but I suspect it will be the last OS they have a monopoly on.
Anyone remember the background on boot for Windows 95, and all the controversy over "hidden shapes"?
Oh, the irony it was the cloud that killed Windows by rendering, largely, OS agnostic computing.
..don't panic
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram
This is incorrect, x86 can address up to 64GB of memory with PAE or 16GB if using PAE with AWE and the /3GB switch. MS limited desktop OSs to 4GB partially due to market segmentation, and partially due to a large number of consumer oriented drivers that failed validation if PAE is enabled.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If you are old enough, the mind starts to go.
Grounhog day forever!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Windows 8 Start screen sucks for organizing lots of programs. If I go to someone else's computer trying to find the desktop icon can be difficult. Actually with the live tiles most things are the obviously with just glancing at them. According to research done by Microsoft, switching contexts is confusing and non-intuitive, which is exactly what the start screen is.
Metro applications I've found to be too simple to the point of being useless.
Metro apps have to be purchased through the Microsoft Store. If nothing else this makes Metro a non-starter.
Configuration. While this has gotten better with 8.1 and some patches, configuration is now all over the place. Is it in the control panel, do you need to get to it through the charms bar, or the Metro configuration. Basically it went from being fairly easy to find and change the setting you want, to trying to figure out which interface should be used and flipping through multiple screen on that interface to finally find the one setting you need.
Ribbons, nuff said!
Application and games not working. The Sims Medieval, Diablo 2 are the two I know about. Now Diablo 2 is quite a old game, but The Sims Medieval came out after The Sims 3 and The Sims 3 works. Then there is WinDVD Pro 2011. Now I understand that for most people this works. For me it did not because I "upgraded" from Windows 7 and Windows 8 sometimes misses installing some key OS files. I think this case was scripting.dll, or something close to that. Only way to fix this problem would have been to reinstall the OS from scratch. I tried everything else. There were some other programs that I was able to get to work in Windows 8 with compatibility settings that weren't needed in Windows 7.
While file copying, less memory usage and less CPU usage was nice, the reasons listed above, plus some others I'm not remembering right now made me upgrade to Windows 7 when I got a new machine. Basically I was spending a lot of time babysitting an OS, where the OS is supposed to help me get work done.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
No, AWE allows more than 4GB in a single application, SQL Enterprise or Oracle 10G running on 2003 x86 Enterprise can utilize 32GB just fine, I know because I ran just such a configuration back in 2006 before x64 was mainstream.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As someone who has investigated what the compiler (.NET) does on a 64-bit machine I can answer your questions somewhat:
Are the 64 bit registers and arithmetic used often, or would that have more of a scientific number crunching (corporate) application than anything else?
Yes. The original registers were ax, bx, cx, dx, si (code pointer), di (data pointer), bp (byte pointer), sp (stack pointer). As you can see, there are only 4 values that you can hold at once. And cx and dx have special meanings in some commands, so only a and b are really free. This means that if you have even 3-4 local variables, most likely one or more are being stored on the heap. 32-bit doubled the size of all of these, but you were still basically severely limited to 2-3 registers at a time for actual programmer usage.
64-bit adds 8 more free and open registers (r8-r15). These can be filled with anything meaning that any subroutine that has local variables that go out of scope quickly most likely doesn't actually store these values on the heap at all anymore. This means that there is no memory access at all, which leads to much faster code.
32-bit goes up to 2 billion, so 64-bit math is rarely used for integers. But 64-bit floats are very common. And floating point math is much faster. Also, there are extensions for math like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SIMD, etc., all of which also have their own registers. And now people are using graphic cards to do really fast math sometimes as well.
Or can they sometimes cram two 32 bit numbers in a register and process a 32-bit program twice as fast?
You can, but with so many registers available now, there's usually no reason to so it rarely happens.
I assume that that 64-bit opens up a lot of extra room for processor commands. Do they use more commands making bitcode more succinct and faster?
All the new processor commands are called: MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SIMD, etc.
It's not so much that the new commands make things more succinct, they just do more in hardware. For instance, if you have ever zipped anything, you have probably seen the CRC32 checksum that goes along with each compressed file. Well, that's now a command in SSE4.2. So you can have the CPU do CRC32 for you and it's 10-times (or more) faster than doing it in hardware. It's just a matter of whether, for instance, WinZip, 7-Zip, Explorer or whoever actually rewrites their code to use this CPU command. (And whether you downloaded a new version since they did this.)
Similarly, it's not a matter of whether a programmer knows about these commands, because these days most people write in Java or C#. It's a matter of whether the .NET or Java compiler gurus that turn the IL into assembly with on-the-fly compilation on your machine know about all these new commands. Since there is no CRC32 command in .NET, that command will never be used by most normal people, even if they are using CRC32's, because the Just-In-Time compiler can't tell that that's what their subroutine is doing.
And of course it would make them quicker to execute as more data can be crammed into a single word (The Word length would go up to match the number of bits, I assume. I think I remember working with 32 bit words in univ, so that makes sense)?
Actually, strings are a hair slower in 64-bit because they are usually UTF-8 or UTF-16 so characters are a little more inefficient to work with. I'm really not sure why there aren't new CPU instructions for the most common string functions for the most common string types. Maybe somebody can get on that. But I guess that most string handling is so efficient already that nobody notices that much.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
And for years, many poorly-written buggy drivers would crash immediately if PAE was enabled.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Most of those things can be done on a 32-bit OS when the CPU has a feature like PAE, but the fact is that even when not using desktop Windows (which is purposely crippled) you're far more limited than when in a 64 bit environment.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
MS clearly wants to force Windows 8 onto its users, even if it means pissing them off, we knew that from day one. This is clearly their last ditched method of getting it done.
Cant get someone to buy your "upgraded" product? Force them.
The sheer backlog of OEM keys will remain in circulation for at least 2-6months afterwards.
If you cant get a 7 Key after that, might as well buy a tablet. Then you can read on wikipedia about what computers were like before the "Useless Big Empty Square Monster" took over your PC.
Why not just run dos? Then you don't need any emulation at all.
This one goes to 11, it's one louder.
Note, Classic Shell is a must if you don't want to tear your hair out.
Classic Shell solves a lot of things, but it doesn't solve the control panel items being in multiple places, defaulting to full screen Metro versions of apps, and a half dozen other things. Most (not all) of these have solutions, if you're willing to put the time in, but there is one solution that fixes everything -- boot the Windows 7 recovery disk and choose install. Then wait for Windows 10 SP1. If Microsoft hasn't a clue by that time, switch to another platform.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Each application is still capped at 4GB of addressable space in PAE. So if you are hitting the 4GB cap because of lots of apps using a lot of memory rather than 1 app using all the memory, then PAE is a "good" solution. But upgrading to a 64 bit OS is probably a better solution.
Dealing with win 7 after running unstable branch of debian for 8 years.
MS is still a running joke watching the hard drive light chugging away. Then there is windows 8 which is a slap in the face. Beautiful and slow on a modern computer BEFORE any software is running!
An OS is not an 'experience' its a f**king Operating system to 'run' software. MS has long since forgotten this.
No, AWE allows more than 4GB in a single application, SQL Enterprise or Oracle 10G running on 2003 x86 Enterprise can utilize 32GB just fine, I know because I ran just such a configuration back in 2006 before x64 was mainstream.
Or you could use a modern OS which does it natively without any switches. Not to mention Windows 7 takes advantage of modern hardware which XP/2003 does not.
Why are you "trying to find the desktop icon"?? Win+D will take you straight there from anywhere, or right-click in the lower left corner (on the Start button, or where it would be) and choose Desktop; it's the bottom item and appears directly under your mouse (that menu - full of other useful desktop shortcuts like Computer Management and CMD or Powershell - can also be accessed by hitting Win+X).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It's fashionable to complain about the replaced start menu in Win 8.
It wasn't just that, it was all the touch shit crammed into a desktop OS that failed to work well with a mouse and keyboard. Ballmer et al., were chasing after the "golden fleece" of a "universal interface" by j-j-j-jamming touch into desktops/laptops. They thought that mobile interface on desktops would work better than desktop interface on mobiles (XP tablet edition, to be specific).
They're finding out that people use different form factors in different ways/use cases and that the interface should follow the use and form factor.
Winidiots swear up and down that Linux "will never be ready for grandma." I have to tell you that from personal experience "grandma" hates 8 more than any Linux desktop environment.
--
BMO
Most of what you talked about are annoyances, rather than serious issues.
An annoyance that appears every day becomes a serious issue.
--
BMO
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram
This is incorrect, x86 can address up to 64GB of memory with PAE
But I have 65GB of memory, you insensitive clod!
One should be legally able to downgrade any version of the software he/she legally acquired. Without support obligations, of course. This will make the software market crippled by overly broad copyright laws much healthier.
Because it's a GUI. If I wanted to learn shortcut keys and type out words I'd use VI or Emacs.
Thanks for letting us know, Captain Obvious! I almost ran out and bought a copy of each because I thought I was missing out on what everyone else was using!
There is no earthly benefit to running Windows as 64bit and no one can articulate what that benefit is. Oftentimes it makes things worse as one is required to run parallel versions of things and not even Java is a one-size-fits-all across the board. The vaunted promise that 'things will run better and faster' is complete nonsense and hardware vendors as it is find it difficult or impossible to create useful distinctions in drivers or even sort out which version is a maintenance fix for what. So they killed off XP? Fine. Killing off Win7? Fine. Killed off Win8 with no clear path forward whereas 8.1 isn't an upgrade it's a replacement? Fine. And now Win9 is Win10 and once again Redmond will give us 36 dozen different sub-versions? Wonderful. But let's at least disabuse ourselves that 64bit is meaningful.
Regarding the benefits of Microsoft OS 32bit vs 64bit
These values are a huge deal for Citrix (or terminal server) admins:
Paged pool 32bit: 550 MB 64bit: 128 GB /3GB switch, but it's unusual to do that with Citrix or TS
Non-paged pool 32bit: 256 MB 64bit: 75%RAM up to 128 GB
Page Table Entry 32 bit: 250K 64 bit: 33 M
System Cache: 32bit: 860MB 64bit 1TB
Note: 32bit values are much lower with
si = source pointer
di = destination pointer
bp = base pointer (also known as the frame pointer)
If you have a single process that needs to use more than 1.6 - 2.0 GB of memory ... you need the 64 bit version.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have official, stable a 64 bit Windows version yet.
However when they do they will have no problem leaking memory up to 16 Exabytes.
the next good version of Windows coming out?
I hear they're skippimg Win 9 and going straight to Win 10 which will presumably suck, so when is eleven coming out?
What you said did not refute that 32 bit can not utilize more than 4GB. PAE is 36 bit, not 32.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Linux is free. Hell, even OSX is free. Yet MS wants to keep gouging customers $100
We have been down this road countless times before.
In the general consumer market what people buy is the OEM Windows system install. Which tends to be a one time purchase for the life of their PC - with maybe one $15 to $20 upgrade to the next-generation OS.
When shopping for a new or refurbished PC or laptop, hardware with more or less the same specs will sell for more or less the same price, no matter what mass market OS comes installed.
I don't care if its easy and became second nature to you in 5 minutes
MS cares. Because if that was the case with me, it was probably the case with most other users too. And they don't give a flying fuck about a handful of vocal critics on the internet, because there are ALWAYS a handful of vocal critics on the internet bitching and moaning about some shit. A lot of users will skip this generation, just as a lot of users always skip a generation or two between upgrades. But at the end of the day, Windows is still going to be the only OS sitting in most offices and homes. And that's all that matters to MS.
There are just no viable alternatives to Windows right now. OSX only comes on expensive hardware and has almost no support for enterprise users. "Linux" is a fractured mess of confusing distros/UI's with almost zero software support. So, barring IBM reintroducing OS/2 or Google bringing Android to the desktop, Windows simply has no real competitor on the desktop. Right now their biggest threat is people abandoning desktops altogether. But it appears that the tablet market is plateauing, and you can't really do serious work on a smartphone--so I seriously doubt MS is quaking in their boots on that front.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Are you seriously that dense, or just trolling? The bitness is almost always referring to the size of an integer in the chips primary ISA.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ouch. You did not have to go full-on dick mode. It is possible to have a civilized discussion about this:
The MC68000 was a fake 32 bit chip. It had 32 bit data registers but only a 16 bit bus with 24 bit memory pointers; therefore, it is arguable that the "bitness" of a CPU is determined by the width of its memory registers/data bus.
A CPU with 32 bit data registers but a 36 bit width bus is arguably not a true 32 bit CPU.
Regardless, you were trying to be overly pedantic when you responded to
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram.
when he (she?) was responding to
There is no earthly benefit to running Windows as 64bit
which obviously is about XP or Win7 32 bit. Only Server 2003 and Server 2008 non-R2 had PAE capabilities... which would make his statement correct: 32 bits can not represent a number larger than 4GB.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
8.1 fixed some of the worst UI problems in the original Windows 8. For example, you can shut down without having to find the Charms, and there is a search button on the Start screen to make it more obvious that you can do that. (You were always able to just start typing.) But people still dislike the jarring transition from the desktop to the Start screen, which is why addons like Start8 and Classic Shell are popular.
The Start screen is also a pain to navigate without a touchscreen, and doubly so if you like to put the taskbar on the right side - that combination breaks the ability to scroll right on the Start screen by putting the mouse at the right edge of the screen so you are forced to use the scrollbar instead. Putting the taskbar on the left is marginally better, but if you overshoot your target you have to use the scrollbar to get back. Really careless design; Microsoft simply didn't think about the fact that an available UI option breaks another part of the UI.
Windows 10 pretty much brings back the Windows 7 interface if you run it on a system with a keyboard and mouse. You can use the Start screen if you prefer it, but a revamped Start menu (with some live tiles in addition to the usual menu) is now the default. Windows 10 also runs Metro apps in windows on a desktop system rather than having them take over the entire screen.
I'm sorry but x86 has had a 36bit virtual address space since the Pentium Pro, but I have NEVER seen it called a 36bit architecture, because it's not. Also to be pedantic, XP RTM and XP SP1 supported >4GB of ram, and SP2+ support PAE (it's required for NX) but limit the visibility of physical memory above the 4GB line for driver compatibility reasons. MS could easily support PAE and AWE in Windows client versions, they are based on the same code and kernel as the server variants, they just choose not to. I'm not really arguing FOR x86 and against AMD64, just providing a little bit of information and clarifying some statements made in the thread =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A CPU with 32-bit registers and 36-bit addresses is going to surprise people and software that assume that a memory address will fit in a register. I'd expect a lot of software to be simply unable to use more than 32 address bits. If I needed more than 4G for apps (and I do where I work), I'd much rather go straight 64-bit.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Further to that point. Putting aside business/enterprise/corporate customers who are basically buying to maintain compatibility and training, they may be in a a rude awakening soon from their consumer base.
I have Windows 7, and for many, one of the big reasons you run a windows product is for computer games.
With things like Steam moving more and more compatibility to Linux and more and more titles becoming available it is becoming a legitimate option. Hell I could move right now really, because of all the games I have, I pretty much spend 100% of my time playing DOTA 2, which is available for Linux.
Interesting. I took this opportunity to check and it appears that XP SP2 does support PAE. I did not know that. I was mistaken because even with PAE, XP will still only support 4GB. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...
Regardless, the discussion has been quite illuminating. Thank you.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Very interesting stuff. I would have rather went straight to 64 but, but climbing upwards is rarely pretty.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
It's using the same technique that they used on the early consoles. It's a really nasty hack and if you were running that kind of workload, you'd damn well better know the particulars of why it sucked then and is now completely ridiculous. We've had 64bit options available for decades and it's truly sad that a workload of that size would be forced to run under paging hacks to access that much RAM.
It looks like PAE doesn't extend the address space in a given process. It looks like a way either to do old-fashioned overlays, or to have more memory allocated directly to additional processes. It's a step forward, but it wouldn't serve my particular needs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes