so i've been tinkering with some old junk as usual and set up a 32-bit windows 7 machine to run dos/win16 stuff, some old windows programs, etc. i kind of got this vibe windows is dead now (i already run linux on my main desktop) and my life as a desktop[1] windows user was pretty much feature complete around when the core2quad came out.. so i wanted something that was "windows as i want it" - and with a crappy firefox fork and people who are stubborn and still port things back to it. perhaps i'd call it the second half of a two-man team (with another machine, windows xp, that doesn't get to play on the internet)
what isn't cool is windows 32-bit can't use more than around 3.Xgb of ram.. so i was wasting 12 gigs using 32-bit windows for some derpy dos/win16 programs (hey, i think old Print Shop type programs are fun..) but i kind of forgot about PAE[2]. so i google around a bit and apparently professional and server versions of windows will figure it out on their own and turn it on,
or they did, or didn't, or they used to.. lots of memory holes in the internet now.. anyways, it didn't work on my machine, even forcing the flag with bcdedit[3]. more digging found me "PatchPae" which also seemed to be broken.. it was unable to patch the second binary required in the process.
eventually i found the source for PatchPae and it included PatchPae3[4].. following the instructions netted me 16gb of usable ram on windows 7 32-bit!
there's a bit of a catch though. not really a huge one for me but perhaps for somebody.. individual programs can still only access 3.Xgb of ram at a time. for example if you wanted to create a ramdisk that was 5gb out of the 16 it wouldn't work, but you could make 4x3.Xgb ram disks one for the temp directory of each node of your bbs and still have ~2gb left!
speaking of BBSes, if you leave mystic's "mis" running for several months it leaks about a gigabyte of ram[5]! crikey! at least with this setup it won't affect other things anymore..
perhaps i should note my windows 7 machine was updated first to the most recent level possible. it's still possible to install windows 7, validate license keys, and use windows update if you manually download and install two of the updates first. i even went from a 64-bit key to 32-bit and all was fine.
perhaps avoid browsing porn on it though, lest you end up one of the bots plaguing irc servers worldwide ;)
Alex
[1] gaming's another matter..
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
[3] a tool used to edit the windows bootloader settings
[4]
https://github.com/therealdreg/PatchPae2_PatchPae3
[5] according to Windows Task Manager
--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: cold fusion - cfbbs.net - grand rapids, mi (46:1/616)