Would better video card make a diff?

Ouch!

Fair enough, I think I'll just have to live with 3GB - especially since Windows 7 is only available as a 90 day trial version until next year. Being an IT unprofessional, I think I would be playing with fire there anyways.

In any case, the graphics look absolutely fine on this setup: the funny little Dungeons & Dragons style nVidia benchmark test flies along beautifully until of course my entire system crashes so I suspect Veritable's suggestion about the graphics card itself is closer to the mark.

However, I don't notice 'normal' processes being especially faster: a Spydoctor Intelliscan of the system took 10 minutes to run this morning. I'm sure it used to be a little faster than that on the previous rig so I'll get them to take a look at the motherboard as well.

Sheesh!

I'm not sure it's on the OS exclusively. I'm running 32-bit Linux on a laptop with 4GiB of physical memory installed, but the kernel is only addressing exactly 3.0GiB of it.

There IS a 32-bit Linux kernel (PAE, or "bigmem" for debian-based distros) that will address well beyond 4GiB, up to 64GiB, but I think you have to compile it yourself. And then there's something about all of the kernel modules (most of your device drivers here) needing to be able to support PAE as well. "Passing a 36 bit pointer to a function which expects 32 bit pointers is the programming equivalent of Crossing The Streams. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. That's pretty much what happens to your entire system" (minwee, 2008, February 2. There's an interesting discussion of the matter here: http://community.livejournal.com/linux/1754389.html

So it turns out the IT guy forgot to update the drivers on my new motherboard and, stupidly enough, I didn't think to check that with him. I updated the drivers this morning and so far a 1 hour stress test on the system manged 278 passes. I'll set a ten hour test to run at beddy-byes tonight and see how that goes. Otherwise everything seems to be hunky dory for the moment.

Thanks to everyone for the replies on this. Setting up a new rig is no fun when your quota of IT-friendly brain cells is on the low side.

I never understood that basic difference between 32-bit and 64-bit on the RAM issue so it was good to get that straight into the bargain. I guess my next step should be to install a 64-bit version of XP if I really want to dig into Maya?

There really are no good choices for 64-bit Windows.

64 bit XP was never well supported by drivers.

64 bit Vista/Win7 has all the kernel tilt switches and everything turned on, and unlike 32-bit Vista you can't boot to a "yes this is really my computer not Microsoft's" mode. That might not bother a lot of people, but for me it's like discovering Big Brother has put a camera in my bathroom.

Should I be thinking about 32-bit Vista then?

Or maybe just take up bricklaying again?

I'd say you should stick with 32-bit XP until you're dealing with REAL memory... I downgraded from XP to Vista at work because I was upgrading from 4GB to 16GB of RAM (I need a lot for virtual machines). For you, the extra 800MB or so you get will just be lost to Vista bloat.

Fair enough. I guess I should stick with what I've got for the moment. Love your use of 'downgraded', by the way - nothing like a little finely polished contempt to spice up the day.

Do I smell burning ... ?

Never, ever run 64-bit XP. It is the worst OS Microsoft has ever made, even counting ME. Unstable, poor driver support.

Windows 7 is, in my opinion, worth the upgrade. Better user interface, better hardware support, better multi-threading support, better security, and more stable. Aside from the UI changes, the biggest change that a user will notice is that processes are sandboxed (like every other modern OS implemented before Windows) so that a crashing application is much less likely to bring down the OS and other apps with it. Windows 7 also brings down the overhead that Vista required. It is not nearly the resource hog that Vista can be.

That's been true for every NT-based version of Windows, from NT 3.1 onwards.

I stand corrected. I should say "improved" although I have not personally had real BSOD problems since XP SP1.

Between the pair of you, I have definitely gone off the idea of installing 64-bit Windows. Is it the case that Windows 7 represents a marked improvement though?

By the way, I set the nTune stability test running for twelve hours at 9:00 last night. However it wasn't running when I got up at 8:00. The rig hadn't crashed so that's a puzzle. I know the test was still going strong when I looked in sometime around dawn.

The log says the system managed 2452 passes and since the one hour test I ran yesterday managed 278 passes, I assume it had been running close to 9 hours before whatever happened happened.

I don't suppose there's any way I can find out if the computer shut down and restarted after a time? Like a session or something?

BSoD's on a Win9x system are typically due to lack of memory protection that allows a buggy app to access a memory register it shouldn't. In NT-based systems (NT/2k/XP), most BSoD's are caused by faulty drivers in kernel space, since memory protection doesn't cover the kernel itself. With Vista-based systems (Vista/Win7), most drivers have been moved out of kernel space and are only allowed to run in user space, so BSoD's should be rather rare, and may actually be caused by faulty hardware.

I'd wait until enough hoi polloi are actually running it on regular computers. I never recommend upgrading to a new release until it's been put through the Archie Bunker test for a few months.

Turn on administrative tools in the start menu and look at the event log.

A driver failure in user space is still likely to be a fatal error. If your computer can no longer communicate with its hardware devices it's got two options: freeze or panic. Neither is desirable.

Thanks for that Argent - yet another useful tool I never knew about.

I don't see anything at all to suggest there was a crash. Maybe the little guys in the test scene just got fed up and wandered off to slaughter hobbits or whatever it is they like to do of a Saturday morning.