RE: st: Op. sys. refuses to provide memory - a cautionary tale

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

Martin was clearly quoting from a StataCorp FAQ. 

Flak, or attention, should be directed at the full FAQ and what it quotes. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Sergiy Radyakin

Martin, this is very vogue. What is the "total amount of memory on
your machine"?
Is this the amount of hardware sticks of DIMMs (or whatever
technology) that you've
paid your dollars (euros, pounds) for? or is it the amount of memory
that Windows
can see and make use of?

The answer should probably be "the least of ...." followed by some
parameters of the
hardware and software.

Most importantly, even some 64-bit flavors of Windows face the 2GB
physical memory
limit (e.g. Win7 Starter Edition), which means that if you are running
such a system,
installing more hardware memory will not do you any good. 16GB is a
limit for several
64-bit flavors of Windows: e.g. Windows Vista Home Premium.

Let me put a link to the Microsoft's website, as this is very volatile
information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx

The "availability" is also technology-dependent. Refer for example to
the Stata 1.0
manual. It says, in particular: "When STATA is started, the program
examines your PC,
determines how much memory is available, and then lays claim to all of
it. Thus the
size of the largest data set that you can use depends upon the
hardware configuration
of your PC". If Stata 1.0 was available now, and you ran it in Windows
7, would it claim
all the GBs installed and available? No. However the statement I
quoted from the manual
was true, in that sense Stata will make use of all the "memory that is
made available to it",
which may differ however large from "memory that is put into the
computer box". In the
case of Stata 1.0 it would mean that it will honestly make use of 640k
out of perhaps 8GB
or whatever you have in your desktop. [anyone still having Stata 1.0
can give it a shot, and
let me use an opportunity and ask here if anyone still has a copy of
Stata for DOS? or for
that matter, what is the earliest version of Stata that is currently
in operation?]

<snip> 

2010/8/24 Martin Weiss <martin.weiss1@gmx.de>:

> " but what is the final word? How much memory can a 64bit system handle?"
>
>
>
>
> " You are limited only by the total amount of memory on your machine", see
> http://www.stata.com/products/64bitintro.html
>

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