I bought a $700 64GB WiFi iPad, and it arrived a bit more than a week ago. Yet, I still feel like I’m waiting for my iPad to arrive.

I was promised an iPad that would revolutionize how I read magazines and books. It would bring the amazing Apple App Store experience to a bigger screen. It would serve my Web browsing needs at home and be my portable media player/game system on the road.

The iPad doesn’t do any of these things well, at least right now. Some examples:

• I needed directions to the Bronx Zoo from my house. I Googled Bronx Zoo, found the address, and pressed Google Maps to open it in Google Maps. With another press, the iPad routed from my current location to the zoo. Perfect. Now, I needed to print the directions. My $700 iPad can’t print. So, I had to repeat the process from a real computer.
• I know everyone complains about it, but the iPad doesn’t support Flash. Two of my websites use Flash extensively (northrupphotography.com and northrup.org). Flash is everywhere, and while I can get by without it when I need to look up something quick, you definitely need Flash if you want to casually browse and enjoy the Web.
• At least there are the apps, right? I immediately opened the App Store to download the dozens of Apps I have on my iPhone. They’re just not there. Very few designed-for-iPad apps are available now, and they cost far too much. Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone is fun and costs $3. It’s exactly the same on the iPad (but bigger) and it costs $10. Turns out, I’m willing to blow $3 on a dumb game, but $10 seems like way too much. Plus, when I’m stuck waiting in line, I can grab my iPhone and keep myself occupied, or toss it to the kid to keep her busy. The iPad is too big to carry everywhere, and why would I play a game on it at home when I have a real computer and an XBox, attached to much better screens?
• eBooks and magazines just aren’t ready yet. The formatting is terrible (in one book, literally unreadable because spaces and linebreaks were lost). Where are the gorgeous interactive magazines I saw in the previews? Zinio seems to be the only real option now, and all they do is show you scans of magazines, which means no searching, formatting not designed for the iPad (you have to pinch and drag individual pages around to see them full-size), and very little interactivity. USA Today and the Wall Street Journal have apps designed for the iPad, but they’re less functional and dynamic than their websites.
• The tablet format is clumsy. If I try and hold it like a book to read, my arms get tired after a few minutes because it’s too heavy. I can’t rest it on my lap like a laptop because the screen lays flat. If I want to use it as a media player on an airplane, I’d have to bring a stand to hold it up, which brings me to my next point…
• Media is a pain to copy over, because the iPad supports a very limited number of formats. So, I can’t simply copy them over. I tried converting some videos to a supported format, and it took a long time–and then iTunes refused to copy them to the iPad, because I guess I got the format wrong. iTunes could help out here by doing the conversion for me, but I suspect they want me to buy from their limited number of content suppliers.
• I use Google Reader to keep up with about a dozen different websites. Open the page on the iPad, though, and I get the mobile version of the page which doesn’t show any pictures until you click the individual items. Many of the sites I read are photography related, so this ruins them.

I really didn’t approach the iPad as a cynic–I bought into their vision of the future of publishing. The future just isn’t here, yet. I’ll check back with you in six months, but right now, I urge you not to buy an iPad. Instead, grab a Windows-based netbook, or hold out for one of the upcoming Windows-based touchscreen tablets. At least you’ll be able to use Flash.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve published many books for Microsoft Press, and I’m quite sure that Microsoft wants to compete with the iPad. I’m not being compensated in any way for slamming the iPad, though. I laid out $700 because I believed in it.

BTW, a few positive points:

• The battery life on the iPad really is great.
• The screen is awesome. I don’t buy into the idea that only eInk is suitable for reading. After all, so many of us stare at LCD screens all day, anyway. I have a Kindle, too, and I’d rather read something on the color iPad.
• My kid loves the iPad, even though she can’t play her games at the PBS Kids or Nickelodeon websites because they need Flash. I did download a couple of games for her, and they kept her occupied during a road trip. BTW, she’s six, and the first thing she said when she saw it was, “It’s a big iPod!” She’s right, too–it’s a big, heavy, non-portable iPod.

I go on and on about how important backup up your data is. All hard disks fail eventually, and when they do, you’ll lose all your stuff–including your personal pictures and home videos.

So, you need to backup. I tell most people to buy a USB drive a bit bigger than their computer’s C:\ drive and use that for backups. That works well and protects you from a failed hard disk or accidentally deleted files–but it doesn’t protect you from fire or theft, because you’d lose your backup drive, too.

Businesses do off-site backups for disaster recovery. Basically they take their backup drives or tapes to a different location that they can get to if something goes really bad. That doesn’t work well for people, though, because even if you buy a second external drive and take it to a friend’s house, you’ll forget to do it regularly. For the home user (myself included), backups must be automated or they’ll be forgotten.

Enter online backup services, which copy files from your computer to a server on the Internet. When you lose your data, you download it back from them. I checked out the major online backup services and found one that’s working for me.

Online backup services either charge based on how many GB of data you upload or they give you a flat monthly rate. Some of those with the flat monthly rate cap the amount of data you can store to, say, 100GB. I have about a terabyte (1,000 GB) to backup. That means paying per GB is out of the question for me, and I’m way past any caps. If you don’t have as much data, the math might be different.

Consider customer service as you’re evaluating online backups. When you do need to restore files, you’ll discover that it’s not the backing up that’s important–it’s the restoring. You’ll be really disappointed in the service if you can’t access your files or if some of your files are missing.

Most of these services offer similar feature sets–they backup and restore your files. Some of the distinguishing features are:

• Support for MacOS X and Linux in addition to Windows
• Storing multiple revisions of a file (in case you need to go back to a version of a Word file from two months ago)
• Sharing files with other users
• Software includes local backup capabilities (not required with Windows Vista or Windows 7)
• Business, enterprise, or server backup (note that I focus on backups for home users)

The limitations were more important than the features to me. Some limitations of different services include:

• Limiting the amount of backups per month
• Not backup up network drives
• Not backing up external drives
• Not backing up large files over a specific size

I also recommend picking one of the big services–you don’t want your backup service going out of business. Keep these factors in mind as you review my notes of the individual services.

Unlimited Online Backup Services

If you have more than 100GB of data, I suggest choosing an unlimited backup service. I can’t fathom how they can make money redundantly storing a terabyte of data for me for $5/month, but it’s not my problem!

Update (2/7/2011): Oh, the irony of that previous statement. When I first wrote this on January 27, 2010 (about a year ago), Mozy offered unlimited backup for $5/month. I used the service for a year, and stored about 1TB of data on their servers. It took about 11 months just to get that 1TB of data uploaded across my Internet connection. Then, Mozy upped my rates just a bit–from $5/mo to $89.99/mo–an 18x increase. A 2TB hard disk only costs about $80 and will last many years, so clearly Mozy is no longer a good value. I can’t imagine why they don’t come up with a more reasonable plan for those of us with lots of data–clearly they could make a profit at a much lower price point. Instead of waiting another year to upload my data to another backup service, I’m going back to my previous offsite backup technique: backing up to an external hard disk, and then storing it at a friend’s house. My new 2TB eSATA external hard disk is $104 shipped: Fantom G-Force 2 TB USB 2.0/eSATA Hard Drive GF2000EU. I plan to write a script to copy all my files to it. Then, I’ll take it to a friend’s house for safe storage. In a month, I’ll do the same to a second external disk, and swap it out when I next visit the friend–that way, I always have one disk safely stored off-site. Backups will be a month old, but that’s way better than nothing.

One last thing: BOO MOZYHOME. You wasted my time and annoyed me.

Carbonite – $5/month Unlimited

Users complain Carbonite won’t backup all file types, even if you select them. This is okay for the average user. If you’re a developer and you want to make sure your MSIs are backed up, you can manually choose to backup other file types.

Carbonite won’t backup external drives, which is a problem for me. Otherwise, they’re very comparable to MozyHome.

CrashPlan – $4.50/month Unlimited

CrashPlan can store multiple versions of a file (in case you need to go back to an earlier revision) and they provide both local and off-site backups. Of course, you don’t really need the local backups if you’re using Vista or Windows 7, because they have backup software built-in.

CrashPlan offers a “seeding” service which starts your backup by shipping storage the old fashioned way–with UPS. This helps to overcome the VERY LONG initial backup period. For MozyHome, the initial backup has taken months. I didn’t mind waiting because I have local backups anyway, but if you’re willing to spend some time with shipping, this is a nice feature.

CrashPlan charges you more for constant backup without ads, so you might not actually get the $4.50/month price and be happy with it.

CrashPlan also offers a Linux client.

ElephantDrive – $5/month Unlimited

ElephantDrive works, but they limit files to 1 GB each. If you upgrade to their $10/month plan (which allows up to 4 computers to be backed up), they’ll backup files up to 2GB in size. I still need bigger files, but most people don’t.

You can also use it for file sharing on the Internet, because you can upload any file.

Like CrashPlan, ElephantDrive can store multiple revisions of files.

BackBlaze – $5/month Unlimited

Files are limited to 4GB each and they can store multiple revisions of files.

Space-Limited Online Backup Services

If you don’t have that much data, these might be good for you:

iDrive – $5/month for 150GB or $15/month for 500GB

Free 2GB backups and they store multiple versions of your files.

SpiderOak – $10/mo per 10GB or $100/year per 100GB

They support Windows, MacOS X, and Linux and store multiple versions of files, but the per-gigabyte pricing would get expensive for me. They provide file-sharing capabilities, too

Dropbox: $10/month for 10GB or $20/month for 100GB

They support Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Like MozyHome, they give you 2GB for free. DropBox makes sharing files with other users easier, so it actually provides services beyond basic backup and restore.

SOSOnline: $30/year for 5GB or $50/year for 15GB

Their software provides local backup, too. The low storage limits eliminated SOSOnline as an option for me.

IBackup: $1/gb/month

IBackup is more of a business-oriented service, and their pricing reflects that. Supports Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Their simple pricing plan turns out to be awful if you have large amounts of data, as I do.

Summary

There are MANY other online backup services that I haven’t reviewed: Syncplicity, Humyo, Data Desposit Box, Zectar Zumodrive, Livedrive, Microsoft Live Mesh, BullGuard, Fabrik, and others! As I mentioned above, try to stick with one of the big providers to reduce the risk that they’ll have terrible service when you need a restore or that they go bankrupt on you.

If you have real-world experience with a backup service, please describe it in the comments.

If your computer seems slow and you’ve already upgraded your memory (say, to 2GB or higher), your next step might be to upgrade the hard disk. First, check out your current hard disk’s performance using HD Tune. Write down the average transfer rate and access times so you’ll know how much better your new disk is. If you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can use the Windows Experience Index to get a rough estimate of your disk speed.

Now, figure out what type of disk you want to buy. Write down your choices as you go:

• Internal or external. If you want to improve system performance, you’ll need to replace your system disk, which means you’ll want to buy an internal drive. They’re more work to install, but they’re cheaper and faster. If you just want to add a second disk for backup or more capacity, go external.
• Physical size. If you have a laptop, you probably need a 2.5 inch drive. If you have a desktop, you’ll want a 3.5 inch drive.
• Interface. Nowadays, most computers use Serial ATA (SATA). If you want an external drive (which will save you from having to open your computer’s case), use external Serial ATA (eSATA) if your computer has it. If not, use Firewire (if you have it). As a last resort, you can use the USB interface. Your disk will be slow, though. If you choose Firewire (IEEE 1394) or USB, buy a disk with low RPMs, because you’ll save money and electricity, and the performance difference won’t much matter. This picture shows internal SATA (in red) and external SATA (in black):

Now that you’ve written down your choices, do a search at Amazon.com or TigerDirect.com. For example, you could search for “3.5 inch external serial ata” or “2.5 inch internal serial ata”. You’ll see many different models, with varying speeds and capacities. Consider these points:

• Speed. For conventional drives, the most important metric is revolutions per minute (RPM). Typically disks come in 4500, 5400, 7200, and 10000 RPMs. Faster is better, but uses more power.
• Capacity. Bigger is better because you can store more stuff, of course. For conventional drives, bigger drives also improve performance–usually. For example, if you compare two 7200 RPM drives at 500GB and 1.5TB, the larger drive will probably be faster. You always need more disk space, so buy the biggest drive you can.
• Solid-state or conventional. Super-expensive solid-state drives use flash memory instead of rotating magnetic media like a conventional disk. As I described here, they’re each fast in their own way. Conventional disks are still the best value for most people. Get a solid-state disk only if you’re a mobile user and you want to improve battery life or need durability (and you don’t mind Windows being a bit slower).

Here are some factors to ignore:

• Brand. For home users, this doesn’t much matter. You’ll find people with horror stories about every brand of disk. So, disregard it.
• Throughput. Drive manufacturers always list the maximum theoretical throughput of the disk, but it has no bearing on the drive’s actual performance. So, just disregard it.

Hard disks sometimes attempt to distinguish themselves based on power usage, noise level, reliability, and warranty. If power usage and noise level are important to you, find a disk that specializes in those areas. I generally dismiss reliability claims, because for home use, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Hard disk manufacturers have definitely cranked out some unreliable drives, but there’s no good way to know if a current model is going to be reliable. Nowadays, most drives are plenty reliable, but regardless, you’ll need an extra disk to make backups. I dismiss warranty, too, because by the time the hard disk dies, newer, better disks will be available for less, anyway.

Checklist

Wait, don’t click buy yet! Double-check these things:

• Does your computer support the interface?
• Do you have a cable to connect the hard disk?
• If the hard disk is internal, does your computer have an extra power connector? If not, buy a Y-adapter/power splitter.
• If the hard disk is internal, do you have room in your computer to store it? if the storage big is bigger than 3.5″, be sure your disk includes mounting rails. OK, I admit it–my computer has a non-mounted hard disk floating free inside the case, but that’s a bad idea.
• How are you going to back it up? If it’s worth saving, it’s worth backing up. Consider buying two drives so you know you have enough space for backups.

During installation, you can skip entering the Windows 7 Product Key–just leave the field blank (as shown above).

Windows will run normally for 30 days, but it’ll be nagging you to enter the product key in the whole time. After 30 days, it’ll lock itself down and prevent you from doing most tasks on the computer. No worries, just follow these steps:

1. Click Start and then type cmd.

2. On the Start menu, right-click cmd and then press Enter.

3. When prompted by User Account Control, click Yes to start the command prompt with administrative privileges.

4. Type slmgr -rearm, and the press Enter.

5. When prompted, click OK to restart your computer.

Windows 7 will begin nagging you again, but you’ll have another 30 days. You can only rearm Windows 7 three times, allowing you a total of 120 days. Sure, it won’t last forever, but it’s great for those test computers that you tend to regularly re-install.

After that? Buy a license! You can do it directly from Windows, online, or at just about any electronics store.

That’s a screenshot from my favorite free tool for testing hard disk performance–HD Tune (there’s a pro version you can buy, too). That’s from my Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 1.5 TB SATA drive backup drive.

The Blue Line–Transfer Rate

First, the blue line is the transfer rate. That’s the speed which the hard disk sends data to the computer when a big file is lined up nicely–defragmented, in other words. Notice that the line starts high (at 126 MB/sec) and drops (to about 57 MB/sec). That’s because the test moves from the outside of the drive to the inside. Disk drives are round, like a record, and so the outside spins faster (in inches/sec) from the inside.

Windows starts storing data on the outside of your disk, and works its way towards the center. That way, your files will be as fast as possible. The fact that the performance drops by 65% from the outside to the inside of the disk helps illustrate that disk performance is WAY better for files stored on the outside of the disk. It also shows one big reason why, as your disk fills up, it also slows down.

The Yellow Dots–Access Time

The yellow dots show random access time. That’s the time it takes for the disk to jump from one part of the drive to the next. In other words, that’s how long it takes to jump from the end of one file to the beginning of the next, or to jump between two segments of a fragmented file. The average access time for this disk is 13.5 ms–but lower would be better.

USB Flash Drive Performance

The previous graph shows typical performance from a hard disk, but USB flash drives behave very differently. They don’t have spinning platters–data is read by sending electrical signals. If you think they’ll be faster, you’re right. If you think they’ll be slower, you’re right.

As you can see, the transfer rate is WAY slower. My Seagate had an average transfer rate of 100 MB/sec, but my USB flash drive was at 16 MB/sec–about 6X slower. The access time is 0.8 ms, though–about 17X faster. So, USB flash drives are faster at random access and slower at sequential reads.

ReadyBoost uses this to improve the performance of Windows by caching files from the hard disk to a flash drive. If it would be faster to read it from the flash drive (like, if it’s a small segment of data that would need to be randomly accessed), it reads it from the flash drive. Otherwise, it takes advantage of the hard disks high sequential read performance.

Many new mobile computers ship with flash drives instead of conventional disk drives. In some ways, performance is better, and in other ways, performance is worse. The transfer rates of flash drives will increase over time, however, and Windows 7 includes some major improvements that speed up flash drives.

How to Get the Best Performance

I do a great deal of photo and video editing with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II–that’s 21 megapixel pictures and 1080P video–and a really fast disk makes things much more efficient. When I bought a new computer, I set it up with a very fast disk subsystem. Not the fastest in the world, mind, you, but a good bang for the buck. I chose two EXPENSIVE 15,000 RPM disks and put them in a RAID 0 array, which reads and writes to both disks at the same time. Here’s the performance I got:

Overall, that’s about twice as fast as my 1.5 TB drive (though I might have expected better…)

On Laptop Performance

So far, I’ve been discussing the disk performance of my desktop computer (a Dell Precision T3400). The main reason I bought a desktop was to get better disk performance–laptops tend to be really bad, owing to the use of small disks. Remember my lecture about how disks perform best at the outside edge of the platter? Well, smaller disks have smaller outside edges, so performance drops. Laptop disks also tend to be optimized to reduce power usage, so they spin at a slower RPM. Here’s the disk that shipped with my Dell D820:

Abysmal, right? The average transfer rate is 3X slower than the cheap Seagate drive I began this discussion with. All hope is not lost, however. It’s not too hard to upgrade a laptop hard disk–just backup to an external disk, swap drives, and then do restore to the new disk. I upgraded to a newer, faster, 500GB drive and got this performance:

The new disk doubled the average transfer rate (though the access time actually dropped a bit). It sped up the computer noticeably. So, if our laptop seems slow, upgrading the disk might be the right choice.

Got a fast or slow disk? Need some advice about hard disk performance? Tell me about it in the comments.

I’ve been studying for the Microsoft Certification exam 70-536 with the first edition of the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536) book.  I’ve noticed that there are many mistakes in this book and some chapters are a lot harder to process than others as they appear to be written by a different author to other chapters (e.g. Chapter 9 and 10).

I’m considering purchasing the second edition of this book but I wondered whether you could please let me know how much revision has gone into the book and if all of the errors have been corrected in the second edition.

I have also found that there are topics covered in the exam that aren’t in the text book – does the second edition cover all of the required exam topics?

Many thanks!

Hiya. The first edition really did have major problems. I did my best to resolve them all in the second edition–I wrote the entire book rather than dividing it between myself and another author, I triple-checked everything I wrote, and the editing team was much more thorough. Overall, reviews on Amazon seem to show that the effort was successful. Everyone really likes the book and people almost unanimously pass the test based on it.

Re: covering every topic on the exam–I thoroughly covered every objective on the public exam preparation guide:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-536#tab2

And I personally have taken and passed the 70-536 exam. With that said, Microsoft isn’t legally allowed to provide me the exam questions, and as a test-taker, I only saw a portion of the exam questions. Also, Microsoft regularly changes the content of their certification exams. So, it’s entirely possible that the exam writers would cover something that I didn’t think to cover in the book. However, as I mentioned, Amazon reviewers report passing the test based on the book, so while it might not be perfect coverage, it’s very good.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

Tony

When I plug the headphones into my iPhone, there’s no background noise–just perfect silence.

So, I went searching for a solution to the problem. Turns out, it’s not a software update or a configuration problem. I just have a cheap sound card. All sound cards introduce some level of noise (though my iPhone doesn’t seem to) and cheaper sound cards introduce more noise than better-quality sound cards.  Being a laptop, my computer has the sound card built into the motherboard, which makes it prone to this type of background noise.

If this were a desktop, I could simply add a better-quality sound card and plug my headphones or speakers into it. With a laptop/notebook/mobile computer, I need to add an external sound card or USB headphones (as described later). Check the reviews–some are better quality than others.

This problem also extended to recording. I regularly record voice-overs for instructional videos, and I had a seemingly incurable problem with background noise. When I bought a digital microphone (which uses a USB connection rather than the mic-in port), the background noise disappeared. Because I wasn’t using the analog microphone port on my laptop anymore, it wasn’t subject to the motherboard-induced background noise. The headset I bought also had headphones, and those headphones were immune to the background noise, too.

Moral of the story: if you hear noise when you plug a mic, headphones, or speakers into your computer, use a USB connection instead of the built-in analog connection.

Hi,

I just got finished building myself a new system…to bad for me that I didn’t think to look and see if Vista had a memory maximux. I purchased the full retail version of Vista Ultimate. My new system has 4GB of physical ram…Vista varys betwee bootups between 3.34 or 3.25 GB of ram. I, like many others see all the ram in bios but not in the OS. I have an Intel 975xbx2 MB, Core2 DUO@2.93Ghz /w 4MB L2, PCI-E Radeon x1950 Pro 256 MB and 2 other addin cards.

Here is my question…does it have any effect on the OS or at the hardware layer to run in this configuration?

Observation/Frustration…Why,in 2007…with the tecnology level that is available today…are we still forced to deal withe the same basic issues that we had since the 8088 processor. I’ve read alot of the other post and also HPs’ responce and it almost sounds as though its…physical ram(4 GB) minus address space of all addin cards equals Vista ram…am I wrong?

Charles

Answer:

Sucks, eh? As you probably read in this post, the “4GB” maximum memory limit of 32-bit Windows is purely theoretical. In practice, the max memory is something significantly less, equal to 4GB minus your video card memory and the address space allocated to a couple other hardware resourcse. Typically, the realistic maximum memory is somewhere betwee 2.5GB and 3.5GB.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are discovering this AFTER they pay for 4GB of RAM. For the record, this limitation has always been there, including in Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows. However, nowadays, more computer hardware is designed to support 4GB or more of RAM, and memory is getting cheap enough that more people can afford the full 4GB.

To answer your question, “does it have any effect on the OS or at the hardware layer to run in this configuration?”: It has no effect whatsoever. It’ll behave just like the unused memory wasn’t physically present.

To address your “Observation/Frustration”, we’re still forced to deal with the same basic issues that we had since the 8088 processor because we still need backwards compatibility. People want to be able to run the same 32-bit programs they’ve used for a decade, and that’s very possible with 32-bit Windows Vista (ok, well, there are some compatibility problems, but most things do still work). If you’re willing to give up that backwards compatibility to shake yourself free of the limits of 32-bit, just install 64-bit Windows Vista. The technology is certainly there, and nobody is forcing you to use 32-bit. However, 64-bit has it’s own problems because it lacks the full backwards compatibility provided by 32-bit. You do have a choice, but most people are still better off dealing with the limits of 32-bit than using 64-bit–which is still “bleeding edge”, despite the fact that it has been around for years now.

Re, “it almost sounds as though its…physical ram(4 GB) minus address space of all addin cards equals Vista ram…am I wrong?”… You’re exactly right. Well, 4GB minus the address space required by addin cards and other hardware equals the MAXIMUM addressable Vista RAM.

Hey, on the upside, the 750MB of RAM you’re missing really wouldn’t have made that much difference anyway. :)

Hello

I just wanted to find out why my asus board p5w-dh-d picks up 4gigs of memory in the bios but only 2gig in windows vista business 32bit

Thank you.

Answer: Read this post. That’s just the way it works. Sorry.

and (more after the jump)

Does all this mean that on a Dell M1710 with a 512mb video card, Vista Ultimate (32b), and 2GB of Ram, one is likely to see only 1.4 GB of RAM or less, since Vista needs to match the video RAM allotment with RAM memory?

Answer: No, your maximum RAM is 4GB minus any RAM required by your video card. So, with 2GB and that video card, you’ll still have access to all 2GB. If you had 4GB and that video card, you’d probably only see 3.4GB.

Also, does having a 4GB or higher ReadyBoost enabled USB drive help in any of these metrics, be it on a system with 2GB of RAM or 4 GB?

Answer: It does help performance, but ReadyBoost acts as a disk cache. It won’t affect your maximum memory. and

Hello, I just read your response to the maximum amount of RAM you may actually be able to use in an XP Pro 32bit System. I know your busy but if you have a chance to address my question it would set my mind at ease.

I have an ASUS mother board PLN5SLI, lower end but it is capable of supporting 4gb of DDR2 Ram. My system is only utiliizing 2.75GB of it.  What I gathered from your responses was that my BIOS and what not will take up a certain amount of ADDRESS Space and also my video cards. I have 2 BIOSTAR 256mb DDR2 PCI-E video cards running in SLI mode, so right there i’m down about a gig because of the needed ADDRESS SPACE for the actual BIOS, I/O, PCI slots…… and the cards.

So with my system as it is I will NOT be able to get anymore than about 2.75gb of RAM.

system info:

• p4 – 2.66 Ghz processor
• ASUS PLN5SLI mobo, 4gb ram, SATA headers(2)….
• BIo Star nvidia gforce 7300.. 256mb DDR2 SLI Ready Video Cards PCI-E
• 4gb DDR2 RAM
• Diamond 5.1 Audio Card

I hope this isn’t too much noob talk for you I’m enthusiastic about building PC’s but have a bit to learn as well.

Answer: Yep, you won’t be able to use more than about 2.75GB. You might as well take the rest of the 4GB out. Sucks, I know.

and

Hello,

I read your article on Maximum Memory in 32-bit Windows (http://www.vistaclues.com/reader-question-maximum-memory-in-32-bit-windows-vista/)because I just purchased a new computer from Dell with 4GB of RAM and running Vista Home Premium (32-bit edition).  My system seems to only have 3.0 GB of RAM available.  The BIOS sees all 4GB of RAM, and upon discussing this issue with Dell Tech Support I only got the vague response “It’s used for a lot of I/O functions”.

My processor (Intel Core2 Duo) supports the 64-bit versions.  Should I look into an upgrade?  I’m no expert on these things, so I wonder whether I’ll see much benefit from the inevitable pains of many software incompatibilities.

Thanks, and I will look to your site in the future for many of my technical issues, as they’re explained very clearly.

Answer: Yeah, it sucks that Dell doesn’t warn you that you won’t be able to use all 4GB of RAM with 32-bit Windows. Should you upgrade to 64-bit? No, probably not. Read this article about choosing between 32-bit and 64-bit to be sure. 

The original article (written in 2007) is included for your reference below. It discusses the problems with 64-bit versions of Windows, some of which still exist, but to a much lesser degree. I’m using 64-bit Windows 7 on just about all my computers now, and it’s working great. I have quite a variety of hardware, too, and haven’t run into any compatibility problems.

The original article:

32-bit.

Well, that was an easy choice. Most new processors will support either, and in fairness, there are a few good reasons to install the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. If ALL of the following describe you, you should install the 64-bit Windows Vista.

• I use a limited set of applications, and they are all available in 64-bit.
• The hardware I use is all recent, and I’ve verified that 64-bit drivers are available.
• I need more than 2GB of RAM (maybe for video editing or running multiple virtual machines).
• I’m a geeky blowhard who is willing to waste hours and hours of time to evangelize a wider bus.

Actually, if that last bullet describes you, ignore the previous bullets–you’ll love 64-bit.
In summary, Windows Vista 64-bit is MUCH better than Windows XP 64-bit, but most people will still be happier using the 32-bit version of Windows. Vendors finally seem to be catching up with the drivers, and more applications are available. You’ll still run into some of the following:

• Constant compatibility problems, including Web sites that won’t work properly (think SharePoint, or sites with some ActiveX controls)
• Programs that aren’t available natively in 64-bit
• Games that just won’t run
• Updated drivers (VERY important during the first few months of Vista’s life) will take longer to find because 64-bit Vista requires all drivers to be signed, and the signing process takes time. You can’t turn this off.
• Drivers for unusual hardware (like that webcam you bought three years ago) might not exist at all

Want a second opinion? Read Joe Hancuff’s experience with 64-bit Vista and Chris Lanier’s opinion on 64-bit Media Center.