Blocked PC scam

[Marty]

When I bought an hp pavilion recently the Tecky hp guy told me that although the motherboard could have 4GB additional RAM added the CPU would not handle it. I bought it 'cos it came with 4GB anyway.

Comments, please.

I have a notion that your techie might have been talking about the upper limit on the useable RAM in a 32 bit system. I ran into this issue when I bought my wife a PC (Pavilion as it happened) with 4Gb of RAM on board. My techie explained that, due to the architecture of the system, whilst running Vista 32 bit, it could only actually use around 3 of the available 4Gb. If I wanted to avail of all 4Gb (or more), then I would have to upgrade to a 64 bit OS. At least I think that's what was explained to me... I'm not deeply techie but Im sure someone on the forum will soon put us straight if I've misunderstood that stuff.

marty

[Colin Southern]

I'm not deeply techie but Im sure someone on the forum will soon put us straight if I've misunderstood that stuff.

marty

Hi Marty,

Spot on. Without getting into complicated work-arounds (that often don't work anyway), a 32 bit CPU can only address 4 billion locations. In theory it COULD address 4GB RAM, but unfortunately, some of this address space is needed for other things - so in reality, a 32 bit system with 4GB RAM gives about 3.2 to 3.3GB available. For what it's worth, Vista had extremely high resource requirements; normally a new OS requires double the RAM of the previous OS; XP ram fine with 1GB RAM and we thought Vista would run fine with 2GB ... but it didn't ... it needed at least 4 to perform even 1/2 decent (which was a major problem on laptops at the time because many were limited to 2GB). Fortunately Microsoft sorted it out with Windows 7 - which will run fine on even 2GB RAM. These days I put all my clients on 64 bit versions though - usually with 8GB ram - and it's "just not an issue". Fortunately RAM doesn't cost $850 + tax for 8 MEGAbytes anymore

[arith]

Colin is spot on. Everything has to have a unique address so ambiguities cannot arise, 2 to the 32 is 4GB and so if you have a graphics card with 500MB memory then only 3.2 to 3.3MB unique addresses are left available because some other things need addressing.

It is a good job memory is cheap; I got 8GB of DDR3 1600Mhz CAS8 for half the price of 4GB DDR2 800Mhz CAS4 memory a while ago, well that is what it said it was on a sticker on each pretty yellow heatsink, but I had to adjust the timings manually to get that and then I've stress tested for 1 hr 6 mins with prime95, and according to a Gigabyte techie that should be enough.

Getting back to virus's; I built the new pc to replace this one which was playing up; 15 mins to start, click on an app then nothing, shutting down for no reason ect. It has Kasperski but I thought I would try the microsoft anti virus tool and after 4 hours it found a virus, removed it, and now this one is 10X faster.

[Ady]

I just wanted to ask if anyone on the forum happens to know if it's still true (or was it ever true?) that Macs are "immune" from viruses, or are there some Mac viruses out there in the wild now?
marty

It's never been true as such but until recently it was truly exceptional. However over the last 18 months or so I have seen an increasing number of Macs infected with malware, not necessarily viruses by the strict definition often applied by Mac/*nix evangelists (they are generally trojans distributed via social rather than technical hacks) but malicious software that puts your data at risk is a real possibility these days on any platform and becoming more so. One argument that is often put to me by Mac/*nix evangelists is that the OS is secure, it's only the user space that is potentially vulnerable. However as far as most people are concerned its the stuff in the user space that they care about. It's a lot easier to repair/reinstall the OS than it is to recover your data (given that very few folks I deal with have any backup regime, never mind an effective one), or recover the funds that have disappeared from your compromised on-line banking account.

I haven't done a full analysis but over the last 18 months it's been about 60/40 between Windows PCs and Mac infections when scaling the numbers to take into account that about 80% of the client machines I deal with are Wintel boxes. Of course most of these Macs had no malware protection installed and because of the false sense of security that has been inculcated within the Mac community most of the users were not appropriately aware of the risks associated with their on-line behaviour.

[Colin Southern]

I just wanted to ask if anyone on the forum happens to know if it's still true (or was it ever true?) that Macs are "immune" from viruses, or are there some Mac viruses out there in the wild now?

Here's a copy/paste from a friends Facebook page ...

"UPDATE ON HACKERS - sooooo.... Facebook hackers used a XXXXX tag on a close friends Facebook profile they had already hacked to send a trojan into our (we used to think) totally impervious Apple computer."