comp.sys.mac.advocacy

"PeterBP" wrote in message
news:1if77xq.v35i4t72ir7kN%ask@me.com...
> Snit wrote:
>
> I'm suffering the problems of being limited to 32-bit software at work
> atm. Last and this week I've been working on very large images that
> needs some simple processing.
>
> Problem is that Photoshop is limited to 1717 MB (according to its
> internal settings). Smacking in 4 Gigs of RAM into a computer goes gve
> it ample breathing room, but Photoshop just cant use it.
>
> And it sucks when the image you are working on is a 5 gigabyte file,
> which takes 30 minutes just to open.

You can perhaps do a bit better than this. By default, on Windows each
process gets 2 GB of address space; the remaining 2 GB is for the kernel.
This makes switching to kernel mode faster, which is important for many
apps, though perhaps not for Photoshop.

But some 32-bit programs can use more RAM than this. I have read that
Photoshop is one of these: It has the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag set in its
header, and this tells Windows it can cope with more than the normal 2 GB.
On 64-bit Windows, it will get 4 GB of address space.

If you don't have 64-bit Windows, but you do have lots of memory, you might
configure Windows to use a smaller kernel, but that may make your drivers
unhappy.