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From | Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> |
To | "'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'" <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | RE: st: Op. sys. refuses to provide memory - a cautionary tale |
Date | Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:42:33 +0100 |
Martin was clearly quoting from a StataCorp FAQ. Flak, or attention, should be directed at the full FAQ and what it quotes. Nick n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk Sergiy Radyakin Martin, this is very vogue. What is the "total amount of memory on your machine"? Is this the amount of hardware sticks of DIMMs (or whatever technology) that you've paid your dollars (euros, pounds) for? or is it the amount of memory that Windows can see and make use of? The answer should probably be "the least of ...." followed by some parameters of the hardware and software. Most importantly, even some 64-bit flavors of Windows face the 2GB physical memory limit (e.g. Win7 Starter Edition), which means that if you are running such a system, installing more hardware memory will not do you any good. 16GB is a limit for several 64-bit flavors of Windows: e.g. Windows Vista Home Premium. Let me put a link to the Microsoft's website, as this is very volatile information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx The "availability" is also technology-dependent. Refer for example to the Stata 1.0 manual. It says, in particular: "When STATA is started, the program examines your PC, determines how much memory is available, and then lays claim to all of it. Thus the size of the largest data set that you can use depends upon the hardware configuration of your PC". If Stata 1.0 was available now, and you ran it in Windows 7, would it claim all the GBs installed and available? No. However the statement I quoted from the manual was true, in that sense Stata will make use of all the "memory that is made available to it", which may differ however large from "memory that is put into the computer box". In the case of Stata 1.0 it would mean that it will honestly make use of 640k out of perhaps 8GB or whatever you have in your desktop. [anyone still having Stata 1.0 can give it a shot, and let me use an opportunity and ask here if anyone still has a copy of Stata for DOS? or for that matter, what is the earliest version of Stata that is currently in operation?] <snip> 2010/8/24 Martin Weiss <martin.weiss1@gmx.de>: > " but what is the final word? How much memory can a 64bit system handle?" > > > > > " You are limited only by the total amount of memory on your machine", see > http://www.stata.com/products/64bitintro.html > * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/