2010-03-12

Certain drivers may crash Windows with patched kernel and 4 GB RAM

After some days of testing on two different laptops it seems that certain drivers can crash 32-bit Windows 7 (when running the patched kernel with 4 GB RAM).
In this case the blue-screens are probably caused by drivers for a USB sound card.

This may be an explanation why the RAM is restricted by default for 32-bit consumer Windows - there may be just too many drivers that use hard-coded addressing.

Quote: «…“the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista limit the total available memory” to protect users against incompatible drivers.» - now this makes sense.

However, these drivers most likely wouldn't work on 64-bit Windows

Microsoft's solution for 32-bit Windows is to "disable" ~1 GB of RAM and be safe with all lousy drivers that exist.

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