A Man and his Penguin

Macs are so great for designers, right? Well, on the Cnet forums there’s a guy looking for advanced kitchen design programs for his Mac, and so far nobody has been able to give him a response.

Cue “Use Boot Camp to install Windows and then run your kitchen software in Windows” reply.

If only Apple made a new software suite called iActuallyDoSeriousWork!

——-

One of the reasons I dislike Windows is the way it (as a platform) treats the user. It treats the user like an idiot who shouldn’t learn anything about their computer.

Perfect example. Windows Vista 32-bit, before Service Pack 1, would report the actual amount of RAM that was installed and addressable. For people with 4 gigabytes of RAM, it would report 3.2 gigabytes or less.

People complained to their RAM manufacturer, to their computer builder, and to Microsoft. So for Service Pack 1, Microsoft changed the behaviour so Vista reports the amount of RAM installed, not the amount of RAM that is actually addressable.

There are people to this day who believe that the 3.2 gigabyte limitation in Vista 32-bit was a bug, and that SP1 fixed the bug and is allowing them to use all 4 gigabytes. These people don’t just silently believe it, they argue against people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Only 3.2 gigabytes (or less) of their memory is actually addressable. This is through design; parts of your computer that have their own memory (like SATA and graphics cards) need that amount taken out of the 4 gigabyte addressable total, otherwise the CPU has no way of accessing this external memory.

Upgrading to a 64-bit chip and operating system is the only real way to solve it. Server operating systems do support a thing called PAE which allows 32-bit processors and 32-bit PAE-aware operating systems to have a larger address space, but hardware drivers need to be written to be PAE-aware too otherwise they won’t work. XP and Vista do not support PAE, and even if they did, you’re highly unlikely to have PAE-compatible hardware drivers.

But people don’t want to switch to 64-bit. “None of my programs will work!”  “None of my hardware will work!”.   They don’t know that. Most of their programs would probably work. If their computer, software and peripherals work with Vista, they likely have 64-bit drivers and 64-bit-clean* programs (or 64-bit native ones) available.

*32-bit programs on 64-bit Windows get installed into the “Program Files (x86)” directory. If the 32-bit program tries to access its own files through a hard-coded path, through just regular “Program Files”, then it won’t find them. There are also seperate registries for 32-bit and 64-bit programs, which also can confuse some 32-bit programs.

If I say that a program is “64-bit clean”, then I mean that it runs cleanly on 64-bit Windows, without trying to access directories, registry and libraries the wrong way.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 4:25 am and is filed under Other computers/OS'es, Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.