How could the computer industry allow this to happen?

[Golgatha]

So my tinfoil hat that protects me from Microsoft fell off for a second and I Google'd: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/uefireg.mspx



Then again... boot from a SSD and this is a complete non-issue.

Finally, XP 32-bit... do you have any idea how much ram cost in 2001 when XP was launched? 64MB RAM + 233mhz processor was the minimum back then. I would argue that no consumer would have been able to use >4GB in a motherboard at the time. And to prove that point a bit... here's Intel's chipset roster (thanks Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets

You'll note, basically 1 chipset between 2000 and 2005 even supported over 4GB of ram which was the 955X released April 2005.

Ok I found it, tinfoil hat back on. It is probably better than those mosquito nets Bill Gates is handing out in Africa anyway.

Yeah, I think I was rock'in 1GB of RAM at the time I switched to WinXP, but 256-512MB was more common due to price and the fact that most motherboards had 2-3 slots available.

 

[Voo]

All of that is made irrelevant by the fact that XP's PAE support wasn't crippled with the hard 4G physical limit until SP2, IIRC. All in the name of protecting you from poorly written drivers without even giving you the option to take your chances. Support was there initially, they had to take extra steps to cripple it.

Yeah and you can still just set a flag and get at least the more than 2gb per application and guess what? A whole lot of software gets some really crazy bugs if you do that. Actually the only software where PAE works fine in my experience and from what I've read and you also get some advantages from using it are server things like DBs, which is obviously not the crowd MS targets with their consumer OSes.


You can argue all day long about the semantics and that it's about principles, but for 99.999% of all users that won't be any problem, that's as interesting as the maximum core count of different OSes - nice to know, but in praxis nobody (ok some guys - HPC people,.. - do) cares.
People who'd buy 3TB disks, want to use them as their boot drive AND use a 32bit OS, I'm sure you could get almost half a room full with those.

 

[Nothinman]

Yeah and you can still just set a flag and get at least the more than 2gb per application and guess what? A whole lot of software gets some really crazy bugs if you do that. Actually the only software where PAE works fine in my experience and from what I've read and you also get some advantages from using it are server things like DBs, which is obviously not the crowd MS targets with their consumer OSes.

The /3GB switch only affects process' virtual address range, doesn't require PAE and requires you to enable the LargeAddressAware flag on the binary for it to have any affect since most binaries don't ship with that flag enabled. And even with all of that, any app that breaks because of that is shit anyway because it doesn't do anything unexpected. The developers pretty much have to be relying on undocumented behavior for it to cause problems.

And userland apps never know whether PAE is enabled or not unless they explicitly ask the OS in order to determine if they can use AWE or not.

You can argue all day long about the semantics and that it's about principles, but for 99.999% of all users that won't be any problem, that's as interesting as the maximum core count of different OSes - nice to know, but in praxis nobody (ok some guys - HPC people,.. - do) cares.
People who'd buy 3TB disks, want to use them as their boot drive AND use a 32bit OS, I'm sure you could get almost half a room full with those.

While probably true, it doesn't discount the fact that once again MS went out of their way to add arbitrary limitations to their software. The only company worse than them in that respect is probably Apple.

And I'm sure that in a year or so we'll see lots of people running 32-bit Vista or Win7 asking why they can't boot from their 3TB drive just like we see people confused about the arbitrary memory limitations in 32-bit XP now.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

...

And I'm sure that in a year or so we'll see lots of people running 32-bit Vista or Win7 asking why they can't boot from their 3TB drive just like we see people confused about the arbitrary memory limitations in 32-bit XP now.

And I'll be asking them why didn't they install the 64-bit version, which is included with their Win 7 purchase.

 

[Idontcare]

And I'm sure that in a year or so we'll see lots of people running 32-bit Vista or Win7 asking why they can't boot from their 3TB drive just like we see people confused about the arbitrary memory limitations in 32-bit XP now.

I seem to recall reading that the user can boot from a 3TB drive but they will only have a 1TB partion to boot with.

So the thread headlines might be more of the sort "where is my missing 2TB's!?" rather than of the sort "why can't I boot from my 3TB drive".

 

[Nothinman]

And I'll be asking them why didn't they install the 64-bit version, which is included with their Win 7 purchase.

I'm sure most of the replies will be snarky, but it's still a problem that shouldn't even be a possibility.

I seem to recall reading that the user can boot from a 3TB drive but they will only have a 1TB partion to boot with.

A legacy PC BIOS partition table can address up to 2TB so technically you could boot from it as long as you don't mind wasting ~1TB.

So the thread headlines might be more of the sort "where is my missing 2TB's!?" rather than of the sort "why can't I boot from my 3TB drive".

Well it'll probably start with "Where did 1TB of my drive go!?" and then they'll be told that they have to use GPT to address it all but that they can't boot from that unless they have 64-bit Windows and a motherboard with EFI.

And once again all of the Linux and Mac people will be unaffected. =)

 

[Idontcare]

And once again all of the Linux and Mac people will be unaffected. =)

The customer gets the OS they deserve...

 

[Nothinman]

The customer gets the OS they deserve...

Actually no, most people get Windows regardless of the brand PC they buy which pre-Win7 isn't something I'd wish on most people.

 

[Voo]

Actually no, most people get Windows regardless of the brand PC they buy which pre-Win7 isn't something I'd wish on most people.

I've used Ubuntu, ArchLinux, XP and Win7 on my desktop in the last few years and Enterprise Suse on some HPC servers, and you know what? Haven't had a lot of problems with either of them. Though I prefer Win7 for my hobby stuff (gaming, photoshop,.. much easier if you don't have to fiddle around wine - though that got a lot better in the last years - and there's some new stuff that's just handy), but there's a lot of great stuff for Linux I wouldn't like to miss (and lots of things that just needs gcc, gdb and co)..
At least for me it's a completely different style how I work with them - I can't imagine doing anything without the CLI in linux and although the Powershell isn't as worse as the cmd used to be, I could still manage without it - they both work fine for me.


And yes you're right that the 3gb switch doesn't need PAE, but enabling PAE and still giving processes only 2gb address spaces, doesn't sound too usefull for a consumer OS and I think the Server OSes had much better PAE support and there most apps worked fine with larger address spaces. For a business as MS there's always the question of costs/benefits of implementing or supporting stuff and as long as that's reasonabely I can life with that (reasonable for example would exclude those moronic constraints they wanted to/did put onto the starter win7 packages)

 

[RebateMonger]

Well it'll probably start with "Where did 1TB of my drive go!?" and then they'll be told that they have to use GPT to address it all but that they can't boot from that unless they have 64-bit Windows and a motherboard with EFI.

Well, we've all lived through this kind of stuff many times before since the beginnings of DOS. Workarounds are developed, new firmware is released, new motherboards are sold, and, eventually, things work like they should. And, for better or for worse, most folks keep buying "AT clones" and Microsoft operating systems.

 

[Idontcare]

I agree, we can identify the problem but that alone has limited value-add towards identifying the solution.

I suspect, just like before, we see a little cottage industry exist for a bit selling add-in boards with >3TB boot support or some such for a year or so. Like Athlon and GFD or the early days of SSD's and XP/Vista.

It won't be pretty, rarely is, but hardly an insurmountable barrier to entry.

In the meantime, by my calculations we have at least three more rounds of press releases to wade through from Seagate before an actual 3TB drives shows up at Newegg. So we have plenty of time on our hands to blame MS!