Keith Shirley

It’s not all that long ago where the idea of 4GB of memory in a PC would have seemed exotic. I find things tend to come in batches and I just had the third person asking me about this in the last two weeks I thought I’d pass on what I’ve been saying.

Basically – if a machine is installed with 4GB of memory – then most likely the operating system will not be able to see it. Due to the way the address space is mapped there is a limit in 32bit Windows. In English that means that you should limit most PC’s to 3GB for now. The PC will work fine with the 4GB installed but will cause confusion when people can’t see 8it all reflected in windows.

For reference for the technical people – if this becomes an issue you need to look for machines with PAE (Physical address extension) support in the BIOS and generally a non-standard motherboard with extra pins for the processor (36 rather than 32). This in theory allows 64GB of RAM BUT can cause headaches with drivers (if they are hard coded to work with 32 bit addresses). Part of this is due to DEP (Data Execution Prevention) issues in windows.

I regularly get asked my opinion on .eu domains and I’m afraid it’s not positive. I’m not as down on the whole thing as John McCormac is in his article where the following really sums it up:

“The incompetence of Eurid management is quite staggering. How a bunch of people who had only ever run a third rate, mickey mouse ccTLD ever got the contract to run the .eu ccTLD is a mystery. The result was the mess that is .eu ccTLD.”

For those of you that are not familiar with the term – ccTLD is basically referring to top level domains like the .com extension. Eurid are the people who run the .eu top level domain.

I must admit I’m a little bitter here as when the .eu domains were coming out I jumped through all their complicated hoops to prove the entitlement for a domain I wanted. What really annoyed me was that the answer back basically said I was not entitled to use the domain (even though I know I was). If someone had been faster I would have accepted that. It was not worth the legal costs to challange their answer.

What really annoyed me was when the domains went live – I checked again and the domain was up for sale. It was obviously registered by a company that had no connection to the name and was basically hijacked. I refused to pay – so I’m glad to see they are finally cracking down on it.

The whole .eu thing has been a flop. The majority of people don’t  seem to know that it exists (ok - the geeks do) and compared to the ease of registering a .com address it seems like a real headache.

I imagine the domains will become more popular over time as people wish to trade eu wide and other names become harder to get. For the time being however I advise people not to get too stressed about it.

Now to go see if my domain has become available.