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PC Hacks
book

PC Hacks

by Jim Aspinwall
October 2004
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hacks

Hack #32. Install the RAM Your Operating System Needs

Understand how your operating system and applications use RAM to solve memory dilemmas.

With today's operating systems and applications, the more RAM you can feed them, the better. Yes, Windows 95 only required 4 MB of RAM while Microsoft recommended 8, but trying to run Windows 95 on a system with less than 32 MB of RAM is definitely frustrating. The memory requirements for all versions of Windows are listed in Table 4-1.

Table 4-1. Windows operating system memory requirements and recommendations

Operating system

Minimum amount of memory required

Amount of memory Microsoft recommends

Practical recommendation

Windows 95

4 MB

8 MB

32 MB

Windows NT

64 MB

128 MB

128-256 MB

Windows 98/98SE

16 MB

24 MB

32-64 MB

Windows Me

32 MB

> 32 MB

64-128 MB

Windows XP

64 MB

128 MB

256-512 MB

Windows 2000

128 MB

256 MB

256-512 MB

Windows 2003

128 MB

256 MB

512-1,024 MB

Windows 98 was rumored to go into a memory-addressing performance frenzy with over 128 MB of installed RAM, but after much research this appears to be myth rather than truth. There is, however, a certain truth out there that may have implicated Windows by coincidence.

I've been exposed to several different system board chipsets as well as a variety of CPU choices from AMD, Cyrix, and Intel. It is evident from the sampling of chipset data in Table 4-2 that mass use of these chipsets in PC hardware was coincident with the era of Windows 9x (1995-2000). Keep in mind that these caching limitations in hardware ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007485Errata Page