[Silverback]

Originally Posted by Vega

From what I understand.. those numbers are just what the OS itself can handle (what it will actually use). But applications themselves running on the OS can use as much as they want.

Not quite true, at least with Win 9X. Windows addresses physical RAM, expansion cards etc through something called vtable. The size of the vtable (roughly) is physical memory, plus AGP multiplier X graphics card memory.

Win 9X cannot exceed 768Mb total vtable, cos it wraps around at that point. Then, depending on exactly what the OS and apps try to do, you get anything from it not booting, to blue screening randomly, resets and so on.

There is an ini file hack on the microsoft site for 9X that restricts the amount of memory that 9X can actually see, so if you run a dual boot configuration ie one for work and one for games, then that solves the problem of having to yank the stick every 5 minutes.

The applications cannot use more memory than the OS can address, cos the OS is the provider. If apps were allowed to directly address the RAM, like they did in the bad old days, then you can get one app killing another - used to happen a lot on Win3, and anything 16 bit used to do this cos it ran in the same address space.

Now windows provides "sort of" protected memory space for each 32 bit app.