On 31 Oct 2002 at 13:43, Phil Daley wrote: > At 10/31/2002 01:31 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >On 31 Oct 2002 at 7:00, Phil Daley wrote: > > > >> At 10/30/2002 02:51 PM, David H. Bailey wrote: > >> > >> >Actually, not knowing how Macs operate internally I can't be sure, but > >> >on Windows systems, no matter how much memory the machine might have, > >> >there is still a small block reserved for actual program operation and > >> >OS overhead, and when that gets used and not returned to the system > >> >properly you get these messages. > >> > >> That is only in Win9x. > >> > >> That was removed in NT systems back in '95. > > > >No, it was not removed. The size of the buffers was vastly increased, > >possibly even made dynamic. > > No. The separate buffers for GDI memory was eliminated.
While the total buffer size was vastly increased. The buffers were not entirely eliminated though -- you can still run out of stack space. > >You can get the "out of memory" or "not enough memory to update > >screen: please close some programs" message on Win2K (and you could > >get it on NT 4, too), just not nearly as often, and under much > >heavier load than in the Windows versions based on the Win9x kernel > >(Win95, Win98, WinME). > > Of course, you can always run out of actual memory. It's not actual memory. My system has 768MBs of real RAM and a swap file of minimum 768MBs with no cap (well, it could max out the 20GB drive it lives on). I have seen the "not enough memory to update screen" message, and there was plenty of physical RAM and swap space available. That means some internal buffer filled up, probably the buffer that replaced the separate GDI/User stacks in the Win3.x and Win9x kernels. In short, you can still run into the problem, but in my experience, it is always recoverable without a reboot, and happens only when a program goes completely nuts. In earlier versions of Windows (i.e., not NT), a reboot was always required -- even if you were able to successfully shut down the offending program (which was very seldom the case in my experience), you were often left in such an unstable state that you ended up in exactly the same situation a few minutes later, with one application after another falling over in turn. Windows NT was a great improvement, and Win2K is a wonderful OS. But the GUI is not completely bulletproof. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
