Yahoo! News Story - Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (fwd)

[Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Vintage Computer Festival once stated:
> 
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Teo Zenios wrote:
> 
> >       CAUSE
> >       The Windows 32-bit protected-mode cache driver (Vcache) determines the
> > maximum cache size based on the amount of RAM that is present when Windows
> > starts. Vcache then reserves enough memory addresses to permit it to access
> > a cache of the maximum size so that it can increase the cache to that size
> > if needed. These addresses are allocated in a range of virtual addresses
> > from 0xC0000000 through 0xFFFFFFFF (3 to 4 gigabytes) known as the system
> > arena.
> >
> >       On computers with large amounts of RAM, the maximum cache size can be
> > large enough that Vcache consumes all of the addresses in the system arena,
> > leaving no virtual memory addresses available for other functions such as
> > opening an MS-DOS prompt (creating a new virtual machine).
> 
> Bill Gates must've thought that, surely, no one will ever need more than
> 640MB of memory!

  Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing
(http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/) recently covered virtual memory
handling under Windows.  In fact, his blog explains a lot of wierdness in
Windows and makes for some pretty interesting reading.  The series starts
with

	http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08/05/208908.aspx

  -spc (No one should ever need more than 4G ... )