mkjones

I’ve known about the Windows 4gb RAM limit for some time.

However, I assumed (damn it!) that Vista would be different. I was wrong.

Last night I placed 2 more 1gb RAM sticks into my new uber PC only to find it could not be fully allocated by Vista Ultimate (32bit)

The problem is rather simply explained (there are 1000s of pages of text related to in on the web):

By definition, a 32-bit processor uses 32 bits to refer to the location of each byte of memory. 2^32 = 4.2 billion, which means a memory address that’s 32 bits long can only refer to 4.2 billion unique locations (i.e. 4 GB).

This is true for all 32bit versions of Windows. Although server platforms can use PAE to expand on this. Vista however, does not have this ‘feature’/'hack’.

Now, it does not necessarily mean that ALL users cannot get the full 4gb experience. It depends on what other devices you have installed.

I, for one, have a 512mb (1/2gb) NVIDIA graphics card and my Motherboard (P5B Deluxe) has a shed load of built in memory functions. All of this ‘non-RAM’ is pre-allocated by 32bit Windows and therefore a full 4gb of RAM cannot be used by the OS. It effectively pushes out it out of the way like a bouncer on a nightclub door sending home the late-night stragglers because the club is full.

So what should I do? I currently have 3007mb of RAM availiable in Windows. That means just under 1gb is gone, lost to the ether.

Option A, is to upgrade to 64bit Vista. But my Core Duo 6600 is a 32bit chip so I really don’t see the point.

Option B, is to sell 1 of the 1gb sticks to a friend who has a carbon copy of my PC and live with ‘only’ 3gb of RAM.

In all arguments Option B, wins. Mainly because I have no real NEED for the extra 1gb. With just 2gb of RAM my system is amazingly quick, never has any slowdowns and runs smoothly 100% of the time no matter what I am working on.

4gb will have to wait.

Last last night I was working on a new logo for a project I have tasked myself. After a few weeks working on and fine tweaking the design I was almost done. All the remained, as ever, was the transition from Photoshop to a usable image format such as PNG, GIF, JPEG.

Problems soon arose. Without going into great detail about the inspiration or even the usage of the logo here it is in all its glory:

The above image is the hi-colour PNG 24bit version. Basically the bees knees of image formats when it comes to web publishing. PNG 24 essentially gives you a carbon copy of the original image. You retain all the colour and even get advanced transparency effects. But this comes at a price.

The above image is around 52k. A beastly size by anyone’s measure. Even in the days of quick broadband and dual-core PCs this is an unacceptable size for a web-based logo. I generally stick to the rule of no larger than 20k for images such as this. 10k is the sweet spot, any lower and it becomes a no-brainier.

So what to do?

First of all I experimented with other formats. (Keep reading)