Toshoba braking microsoft's oem licence, confired by microsoft

[StaticPhilly]

hello chaps!

ok i found this amusing aswell as fustrating when i was sorting it out, basiclly Toshiba breached microsofts direct oem licence on one of there laptops. below is a copy of my post and outline of the story that i posted on the toshiba forum. They resused to provide me with the correct rebuild disk and i won my battle thanks to the that annoying long licence that microsoft get you to accept! For the first time in my life i can say thank you microsoft :D

just thought id post this so people can get the heads up if they ever come accross this problem.


so bascilly if your thinking of getting a toshiba box then you might want think long and hard :P

cheers!
Phil



Hello,

OK heres the story,
My toshiba laptop shipped with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Pre 64bit, this laptop has 4 gig of memory so it needs 64bit to use all 4 gig, now, Toshiba only provided me with a 32bit resuce disk which installs the 32bit version of Microsoft Windows 7 Home Pre. Stupid eh?

now, Toshiba, with an attatude of a 13 year old told me, we are not going to provide you with a 64bit disk, we do not have to legally do so, phone Microsoft if you think we are braking the law.

So im guessing they thought i wouldnt, well i did
heres the outline of what Microsoft have said,
Toshiba using our Direct OEM licence and there for have to provide the end users with a media to restore theoperating system to the same version as pre-installed. Due to Windows 7 OEM having both 32bit and 64bit options available on the OEM media they should be providing you with both options. However they only legally have to provide you with the 64bit due to it being pre-installed.

I explained that Toshiba refused to provide me with the media and told me to contact themselves, they then trasnfered me up the chain (basiclly i spoke to 4 people) i got put threw to the UK head office which is now dealing with my case. They have turned round and said that Toshiba are just being awkward in the fact they said they are not braking the law and to contact Microsoft becauseinfact they are in breach of the OEM Direct licence betwean Microsoft and Toshiba.

So whats going on now?
Well Microsoft are now going to contact Toshiba about this, the manager at the head office is going to try and get her ands on a copy of the OEM disk for me, if she is unable to do so then she is going to contact Toshiba and tell them they have to provide me with it. They are also going to investigate Toshiba on this beach.

So my question to Toshiba,
Why when i phoned today did your support safe decide to take a bad tone of voice, raise his voice and try to argue with me when i was being polite and calm with him?
Why when i was told by Microsoft that you were in breach of licence did you say i was not being truthfull?

As i was wring this post Microsoft Head office phoned me, they have phoned Toshiba, Toshiba have told Microsoft they are not in breach of licence due to Toshiba providing the user 'Software' to create there own media, Microsoft disagreed with them due to the licence stating to provide the user the media not a metod to create the media and have handed the case to there legal department and Microsoft are now sending me a retail version of Microsoft Home Premium 64bit free of charge to myself.

So anyway, if a member of staff can answer my two questions above i would be grateful.

thanks

[MrViggy]

Actually, 4GB can be addressed by 32 bits. It's the max amount of memory you can address with 32 bits.

Viggy

[StaticPhilly]

are right thats an interesting one, im running on win 7 32bit at the moment and on the system properties window it shows me "Install Memory (RAM): 4GB (2.84 GB usable)"

was there a switch im missing to get it to use 4GB? or have i just miss understood :)

cheers

[edit]
In programming terms i can maybe see you being able to tell your app to use 4gb with 32bit but as your run of the mill apps ie office etc probally arnt coded in such a way then its still not worth having 4gb on 32bit in my eyes. only my opinion tho, you got me wondering now! :)

[MrViggy]

It is using all 4GB. My guess is that out of the 4GB, you have 2.84GB free (the number on the Task Manager, Performance tab under "Physical Memory" -- "Available").

As for process, they always get 4GB. Whether you have 256MB, or 4GB of physical memory installed. There is no switch (that I'm aware of) to limit the amount of memory a process is allowed to use. Every 32 bit process get's to use 2GB max, with 2GB reserved for "process overhead".

Viggy

[dglienna]

Your video card is probably using over a gig. If you install SP2, it will show 4.00gb in computer properties, even though it can only USE 3.75g, which is the same for Windows XP.

[Arjay]

Although theorectically a 32-bit OS can support up to 4 gbs, the motherboard/chip set may not and Windows may only 'see' a portion of the memory.

[MrViggy]

Although theorectically a 32-bit OS can support up to 4 gbs, the motherboard/chip set may not and Windows may only 'see' a portion of the memory.
True, however I don't believe 2.84 is an exact binary number...

Viggy

[Mr.Webman]

Only when you live with it

[dglienna]

I have SEEN XP PRO that has 4MB of RAM. Computer Properties reports 3.75, although on most boxes, it's more like 3.25

[maxtothemax]

Actually, 4GB can be addressed by 32 bits. It's the max amount of memory you can address with 32 bits.

ViggyDepends. From what I understand of OS design, the last few megabytes of the address space get reserved for paging and swapping (AKA virtual memory.)

Memory is divided into "pages" (usually 4MB, but sometimes 4KB is used instead,) and each page can be either put in physical RAM, or it can be "swapped out" to the hard drive. You can only address so much memory at once, but you may have more total pages that you can address at once. (But each individual process is still limited to 4GB.) Some extra space at the end of the address space is reserved, and each page of that space can be "mapped to" a page stored on the hard drive (basically it is aliased to refer to another page.) So if your OS is configured to reserve the last 700MB or so (which is about what Windows does,) then you can address 700MB worth of hard drive virtual memory simultaneously (although, once again, the total you have might be more.) However, the last 700MB of physical RAM gets wasted.

If you have 4GB of RAM, chances are you don't need virtual memory anyway, but with Windows you can't recompile the kernel and change the behavior.

On all modern CPUs since (I believe) the Pentium 4, there is something called "Physical Address Extension" (PAE,) which gives 36 bits of address space instead of 32. This is done via a very ugly hack, by having 4 separate 32-bit address spaces and switching between them (you can only use one at a time.) This results in a significant performance hit, so it is rarely used. Plus, each individual process is still limited to 4 GB.

[ThachQuanVy]

Memory is divided into "pages" (usually 4MB, but sometimes 4KB is used instead,)....I had it in mind for long enough and wasn't self cofiident still in debates but now I realize that I wasn't wrong about it "-D. Doog noitanalpxe! :D

[MrViggy]

Depends. From what I understand of OS design, the last few megabytes of the address space get reserved for paging and swapping (AKA virtual memory.)

Memory is divided into "pages" (usually 4MB, but sometimes 4KB is used instead,) and each page can be either put in physical RAM, or it can be "swapped out" to the hard drive. You can only address so much memory at once, but you may have more total pages that you can address at once. (But each individual process is still limited to 4GB.) Some extra space at the end of the address space is reserved, and each page of that space can be "mapped to" a page stored on the hard drive (basically it is aliased to refer to another page.) So if your OS is configured to reserve the last 700MB or so (which is about what Windows does,) then you can address 700MB worth of hard drive virtual memory simultaneously (although, once again, the total you have might be more.) However, the last 700MB of physical RAM gets wasted.

If you have 4GB of RAM, chances are you don't need virtual memory anyway, but with Windows you can't recompile the kernel and change the behavior.

On all modern CPUs since (I believe) the Pentium 4, there is something called "Physical Address Extension" (PAE,) which gives 36 bits of address space instead of 32. This is done via a very ugly hack, by having 4 separate 32-bit address spaces and switching between them (you can only use one at a time.) This results in a significant performance hit, so it is rarely used. Plus, each individual process is still limited to 4 GB.
The OS can do whatever it wants with the hardware. Physically, 32 bits is needed to address a max of 4GB. And, yes, hardware manufacturers can (and typically do) whatever *they* want as far as memory and addressing go. I've worked with 8 bit microprocessors that used 10 bits for addressing external memory.

Viggy