On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, bogdan romocea wrote:
You need another OS. Standard/32-bit Windows (XP, 2000 etc) can't use more than 4 GB of RAM. Anyway, if you try to buy a box with 16 GB of RAM, the seller will probably warn you about Windows and recommend a suitable OS.
There _are_ versions of Windows 2000 and later which can support more than 4Gb (and I hope if you buy a box with more memory you would be sold the appropriate version). If you have a 32-bit address space you cannot have more than 4Gb of addresses, physical or virtual. So some modern `32-bit' chips have segmented addressing: see e.g.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx
(where PAE is the scheme used on IA-32 aka ix86 chips). AFAIK the story is the same for most IA-32 OSes: each process gets a 4Gb address space and (usually) 3Gb of that is user space. R's memory usage will get cramped when the address space is tight: you probably do not want to be using 1Gb objects in a 3Gb address space (and if you need to, try R-2.1.0 beta).
The question did not mention R, and `very tough' is not at all explicit.
For large R tasks we have been recommending 64-bit OSes for quite a long time. There are 64-bit versions of Windows for AMD64/EMD64T chips, but not versions of the compilers used to build R for Windows. There are many users here of R under Linux (usually Fedora Core 3 or SuSE 9.x) on such chips.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2005 12:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [R] Amount of memory under different OS
I have a problem: I need to perform a very tough analysis, so I would like to buy a new computer with about 16 GB of RAM. Is it possible to use all this memory under Windows or have I to install other OS?
-- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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