The Register: Mac OS X 10.3 Panther will not be a 64-bit OS

[mikeymike]

Because it said the magic words:

PowerPC 970 aka the G5

:-)

[mikeymike]

Falling behind?  How many other operating systems out there take advantage of 64-bit CPUs?

[mikeymike]

WinXP 64 is not available yet...

And another issue is - what makes an operating system 64-bit?  There are still 16-bit libraries in Win2k for example... an OS could be able to talk to 64-bit CPUs but still all their code is 32-bit (some 64-bit CPUs can handle that, the Opteron and Athlon 64 can I think, the IBM PPC 970 definitely can, don't know about the 64-bit SPARC CPUs).

[mikeymike]

@ vortexau

Sure, go to 8Gb of RAM with Win . . . .
and see it STILL use Virtial RAM!!

If you're going to slate Windows, granted it is an easy target, but you should know the facts first.  WinXP can run without a swapfile provided there is enough RAM available, and absolute oodles of RAM aren't required either (my friend is running XP without a swapfile, and his machine has less than 512MB RAM, can't remember how much exactly).

[mikeymike]

@ Waccoon

There isn't a recommended way of disabling the swapfile on Win2k and earlier MS OS's, although I don't know what hack-job you're using on win2k to disable the swapfile, what are you trying?  If it's just setting swapfile values to zero, then win2k (and previous versions of Windows) will create a temporary one in \WINNT.

Windows and memory management.  Don't go there.  :-)

A good memory tweak for Win98 (and possibly WinME too) under [386Enh], add a line:

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1

Which would make it revert to Win95 style swapping, which was much less aggressive.

Re: Windows memory usage being hard to guage - Win2k as a rule lies about its swapfile usage in Task Manager, it's a documented unfeature.  Use WINMSD from NT4 to get a more accurate reading.

Re: consoles being 8/16/32/64 bit - again it is misleading, for one reason as you say, it could be just one bus that is 64-bit, but also take into account that internally most recent x86 CPUs are 64-bit, however they talk on every other bus in 32-bit or less.