Anyone here seen Stargate SG-1?
Well soon will come the day when we just insert another different coloured crystal to increase ram size and speed.
To be honest I don't think e are far off that now.
But like the man says we are only limited by the means we live by...
Windows Vista, like XP is limited by a 32 bit 4GB memory pool. That includes memory I/O addressing and IRQ sharing along with a Graphic accellerator and the memory installed in the PC which will not address over 4GB of Ram.
I have one PC with 4GB of RAM running 7800GTX Graphic cards in SLI mode and that only shows up as having 2.37GB of available Ram. you have to subtract 2*256MB and all your I/O addresses for bare system use which leaves you with the memory available to Windows. With 64bit windows you are limited again because your peripherals and internals occupy twice the Physical address space they did in 32 bit addressing. The problem here is not the Hardware but the way Windows chooses to address it.
I don't know if you were around back in the days of Dos and windows 3.10-11. But everything was setup using a memory extender. Memmaker or Qemm were the most popular. Memmaker came with MS Dos 6.21 onwards. I a script called config.sys all your devices were setup and memory allocated to each. From IDE, SCSI and Sound ISA or PCI cards to the Graphics card which at that time were around 2-16mb address space. If you had an eaarly motherboard you also didn't have the Co-Processor built into the CPU. CPU's with Co-Processors didn't arrive until the Intel 386DX and were not considered necesary until the Pentium processor arrived in late 1992 early 1993 here in the UK. The P60 was the first to arrive. This meant that a load was taken off of the the software having to create IRQ's and I/O outlets. Even then you had to buy your own seperate comm port ISA card for serial and parallel outlets. Many of these I/O addresses still had to be configured in the Config.SYS file and executed on startup in the Autoexec.BAT and EMS was used to buffer them above or withing the 640k MSDOS barrier. Today that barrier still stands. Even if you look in the latest Vista setup you will find these 2 files on your Boot partition. Whatever you do don't delete them.
The reason that they are still there is our common problem of stability whilst growing. The physical memory doesn't affect how much memory your PC has just the way it is used by the O/S that uses it.
When Windows 95 was released everyone jumped on the bandwagon, but it still inherited the 640k Dos memory barrier and many pieces of software used a clever piece of DirectX programming called PAE, or Physical Address Extender. which worked well for graphics cards like the 3DFX Voodoo cards in games because all the game saw was you initial graphics I/O and not the extended addressing of the 3DFX card attached to it.
To cut a long story short many of the terms and physics were adopted by other developers as a short cut to addressing the shortfalls of Windows memory addressing. MS even encorporated it into Windows98 and extended it further in 98SE. All this was of course 16bit programming. Dos was 8 bitso only had a 16mb overhead. 16 bit took us to an overhead of 256mb of maximum addressable memory. Although you can physically have more memory in your PC by altering a few values in your Windows SYStem.ini file in the Vcache The limit is still there. Because many users still wanted to play their older games (backward compatibility) you still had to use Memory makers in Dos. There the Dillemma began. and stil is to this day. Because of backward compatibility issues you are still limited on memory space in windows whether it is 32 bit or even the latest 64bit you will still get those issues. Apple have taken a better approach. The have built the hardware to go with their software operating system. Even if you buy their latest intel version of their OS you are still limited on the size of your graphics card. This is done so that you will get the maximum out of the O/S. Unfortunately Ms are relying on too many licensees to stop what they are doing to allow a form of requiem to be formed, because the market is so competitive.
The short or the long, it doesn't matter the problems with Windows date back to DOS which is still in use today. I installed a program the other day and a DOS batch exec box appeared on my screen. so we will never escape it. Unless someone re-writes windows with no backward compatibility in mind.
Boring I know but I have said it and am sure I am going to be be criticised for it.
