Digital BW, The Print

Austin writes:

> I also don't know if all versions of Windows can
> address that much memory.

The NT family has traditionally limited application memory to 2 GB.  The
other 2 GB of address space in the 32-bit addressing scheme is reserved for
the OS.  Some special versions of NT (Enterprise versions) raise the
application limit to 3 GB, and lower the OS limit to 1 GB in consequence.

I don't believe any 32-bit version of Windows can get past 4 GB overall.
Some versions of Windows are crippled deliberately, e.g., NT workstation and
XP Home Edition (and probably the same for 2K, although I'm not sure).  Some
other versions of Windows are too poorly written to handle extremely large
amounts of memory; all of the 9x versions are in this category, and Win98
will gag on more than 512 MB without special tweaking.

Ultimately 64-bit addressing and OSes to match will be necessary to deal
with all of this.  Only things like digital photography actually require
this kind of memory over the short term, however, so I don't know how much
incentive there is for vendors to support it.