Tongfamily Website » Video Card http://www.tongfamily.com Tips, Tricks and Traps from the Tong's Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:33:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc en hourly 1 Windows machines can’t use more than 3GB of real memory http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2008/09/windows-machines-cant-use-more-than-3gb-of-real-memory/ http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2008/09/windows-machines-cant-use-more-than-3gb-of-real-memory/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:57:09 +0000 admin http://www.tongfamily.com/2008/09/windows-machines-cant-use-more-than-3gb-of-real-memory/ Who would have ever thought we’d run into the 32-bit limitation. The long and short is that with all versions of Windows, 750MB at the top of memory is useless because it is used for I/O and if you have a 1GB video card, that is memory mapped, so that means you can use at most 2.25GB of real memory in most high end machines on Windows. Sigh. Now that is really a ripoff.

This is why the highest end Mac only has 3GB of real memory, you can’t use more with today’s Leopard, although the newest Santa Rosa chipset 2H2007 machines from Apple use PAE to get around this problem. Windows XP and even Vista don’t support it. Another reason to buy a Mac.

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 64-bits, Santa Rosa, and more

“consumers are being scammed by [PC] OEMs on a large scale. OEMs will encourage customers to upgrade a 2GB machine to 4GB, even though the usable RAM might be limited to 2.3GB. This is especially a problem on high-end gaming machines that have huge graphics cards as well as lots of RAM.”

]]> http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2008/09/windows-machines-cant-use-more-than-3gb-of-real-memory/feed/ 0 Call of Duty 4 does not meet minimum requirements and does not start http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2008/07/call-of-duty-4-does-not-meet-minimum-requirements-and-does-not-start/ http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2008/07/call-of-duty-4-does-not-meet-minimum-requirements-and-does-not-start/#comments Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:40:37 +0000 admin http://www.tongfamily.com/2008/07/call-of-duty-4-does-not-meet-minimum-requirements-and-does-not-start/ If “Call of Duty 4″:http://www.codhq.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=2831 appears to start with the intro screen and then disappears, it probably means your computer doesn’t meet minimum requirements. What an unfriendly and unclear way to handle this problem.

Here is the computer:

* AMD Athlon XP 3200+
* nVidia 5900 FX graphics adapter
* 1GB RAM
* 700GB disk free

So because it is an Athlon XP and not an Athlon 64, I think I’m hosed. The minimum requirements are according to “firingsquad”:http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=17802:

# CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better supported
# RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
# Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space
# Video card (generic): NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800Pro or better

I had forgotten the “differences”:http://www.computing.net/answers/cpus/xp-athlon-vs-athlon-64/10499.html but essentially the Athlon 64 is 64 bits internally.

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