Revealed: More Windows 7 RC details


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Now that we have a near-final release candidate (RC) to play with, some interesting details have emerged, and I'm pretty sure most of this is all new info.

- AAC/H.264/MPEG-2 support will not be provided to Windows 7 Home Basic and Starter customers. That functionality will only go out to Home Premium, Professional, and Enterprise/Ultimate users. But it looks like there will be add-ons made available (free or paid, it's not clear) to users of low-end Windows 7 versions.

- Maximum RAM. All 32-bit versions of Windows 7 "support" 4 GB of RAM, of course. But if you go 64-bit, you can add up to 8 GB in Home Basic and Starter, 16 GB in Home Premium, and 192 GB in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

- Windows Media Player Remote Media Experience (RME) is not available in Windows 7 Home Basic or Starter. However, all versions can share media over a home network.

- All Windows 7 SKUs support 20 simultaneous SMB connections. This works out to 10 users, apparently.

- XP Mode (formerly Virtual PC). As we first revealed yesterday, only Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate are licensed to install XP Mode.

Via: http://community.winsupersite.com

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Who in their right mind would go with a 64 bit Starter Edition with 8Gb of Ram? :no:

True. Unless Windows 8 will be available in 4 years from now, though.

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Who in their right mind would go with a 64 bit Starter Edition with 8Gb of Ram? :no:

Yes, because there are absolutely NO circumstances where a cheap bare bones windows license with a lot of ram would be usefull...

Certainly not useful for render boxes or similar.

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windows77100systemb.jpg

support means that 3GB are usable?

Graphics card memory always counts towards the 4gb limit, so in this case that PC likely has a 1gb GPU installed.

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32bit version ram limit is a limitation due to 32bit. Not having to do with Windows. As for the 64bit ram restrictions, my only reaction is o_O

True, but is anybody really going to use 8 GB of RAM with Home Basic? :p

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Graphics card memory always counts towards the 4gb limit, so in this case that PC likely has a 1gb GPU installed.

Heh... Actually has 512MB of GPU. They dont have any excuse. I mean, RAM is RAM, addressed by the processor, not for the system.

And if the OS itself uses 1GB just to boot then there is something really wrong here.

Gary7, lets hope so. But according with that link this should be already here. They are lying. Probably. They are not a reliable source?. Of course!

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Heh... Actually has 512MB of GPU. They dont have any excuse. I mean, RAM is RAM, addressed by the processor, not for the system.

And if the OS itself uses 1GB just to boot then there is something really wrong here.

Gary7, lets hope so. But according with that link this should be already here. They are lying. Probably. They are not a reliable source?. Of course!

Errr thats always been the case, if you install anything greater than 4GB on a 32Bit machine you will always see around 3GB due to the RAM stored on the Graphics Card and all other components needing to be addressed.

No one is lying or making excuses its a physical limit that can't be worked around. Just the same as there being a limit on 64Bit though it is 16.8 Million TB so we won't be hitting that any time soon. However we first have to up the address bus to 64Bit before we can take advantage of that, I believe the current limit is 48Bit so we can only access 2^48 of the 2^64Bit available.

Edited by jelli
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so does this mean that 32bit now will recognize "all" of your 4gb of ram? if so i guess i really don't need x64 as all i currently have is 4gb in my system.

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so does this mean that 32bit now will recognize "all" of your 4gb of ram? if so i guess i really don't need x64 as all i currently have is 4gb in my system.

Recognize, NOT use, just like vista after SP1.

and you should use 64 bit anyway, even if you don't have 4+ GB, there's simply no point not using it, it's just as fast, you CAN use 64 bit, and the drivers are generally more reliable, even if that's not a huge problem anyway (outside of those damn crappy RTL network drivers anyway)

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Recognize, NOT use, just like vista after SP1.

and you should use 64 bit anyway, even if you don't have 4+ GB, there's simply no point not using it, it's just as fast, you CAN use 64 bit, and the drivers are generally more reliable, even if that's not a huge problem anyway (outside of those damn crappy RTL network drivers anyway)

i currently have 7 x64 installed, i was just saying in general. i dunno i may add another 2gb to my rig someday.

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Heh... Actually has 512MB of GPU. They dont have any excuse. I mean, RAM is RAM, addressed by the processor, not for the system.

And if the OS itself uses 1GB just to boot then there is something really wrong here.

Gary7, lets hope so. But according with that link this should be already here. They are lying. Probably. They are not a reliable source?. Of course!

It's not about memory, it's about address space. The two are separate (but related) concepts. The address space is a list of addresses that can point to anything. The kernel has a single 4GB (32-bit) address space in which to fit references to all your hardware. The more of the AS it uses for other resources, the less it can use to reference RAM. The RAM it can't fit in the AS is simply ignored and left completely unused. It's simple math.

Now there is a solution to this, and it's called PAE. It brings 64-bit addressing to 32-bit Windows, and when used in combination with a motherboard that supports 36-bit addressing of the physical RAM (most modern ones) means it's theoretically possible to not just support the full 4GB, but also up to 64GB of RAM. There is a catch though, and that is that everything which runs in kernel mode has to be PAE-aware. On Windows this is not the case and it was thus disabled in the client editions (it's available in Server and up) for compatibility reasons. Other operating systems don't have as much of an issue with it, as they generally do not have to support binary-only stuff from third parties.

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fixing the hole in the **** , no one should use the starter/basic edition in the first place, i just keep asking myself why do microsoft like to make it hard. We , the people of neowin take it easy, but think about the guy who gets home with a new PC after seeing a vista/7 add with the glass and things like that, and he has vista/7 but no glass and no nothing. I never got to see a PC using "Starter" edition, and the PC's running "Basic" were switched to Ultimate by me :p

All i mean is that i like to prank and make fun of people, but i'm not taking their money over it. Microsoft takes $199.95 for vista basic.

Edited by vladtm
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No, it means "print the amount of physical RAM installed on the system properties page so the user knows the machine actually has it and that he wasn't ripped off, even though it cannot in any way be used."

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love to max out on RAM - whatever the motherboard can support.

I use most of the RAM as a Ramdisk (Qsoft Enterprise x64) for page file, temp files, internet junk, portable Firefox, Photoshop and video rendering scratch disk, games and running whole virtual machines at blistering speeds.

My current setup is 8GB - 3.5 for Win7 and 4.5 for the Ramdisk.

Saving $$ to get 16GB soon.

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Why put a page file on the ram disk instead of just turning it off, though? It seems like a rather pointless excercise.

People who use a RAM disk for pagefile are not helping themselves.

Not only are you limiting your available RAM, you loose that pagefile if the computer is turned off. Also, Superfetch does what you are doing, but in a lot smarter way.

To me, I have 8GB's of RAM, guess what I did? Though, it's not recommended, disabled my PF, I haven't ran into any problems yet, but if and when I do, I'll re-enable it, until then, I'm happy with what I have.

RAM disks are something from early days, they are now effectively useless.

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