This posting is my announcement that I am leaving Microsoft for the great unknown. Not unknown as in a new job. I mean unknown as in unemployment, recharging the ol' batteries, bumming around, "Ohmygod What have I done?" and "What am I going to do next?"

I wanted to take the time to thank every one of the Tablet fans that I've met, from Lora Heiny and her fine family, Terri Stratton, Linda Epstein, Rob Bushway, Dennis Rice, Chris Hassler, Nancy Lush at Lush Group, the two funny guys from England who attended TechEd05 in Orlando FL and actually bought Tablets because of me, and the hundreds of others that I've met online, over the phone, and in person. And all the fine people I've worked with on the the Tablet projects over the years.

Thanks also go out to everybody who took an interest in my career at Microsoft. I came in as a temp working on Windows 95 applications compatibility and I go out working on the coolest consumer input technology, touch input. I made it to the ten year mark!

This decision is not directly due to the furor generated by my little December blog post, but that certainly didn't help my standing in my working life. It's been a couple of years in the making, but even after a couple of years knowing this day would come, it's shocking to know that it's finally here.

I am happy to have moved the needle, no matter how little, on the openness of Tablet development at Microsoft and hopefully I have advanced the public's understanding of Tablet technology.

Thank you!

https://www.dell.com/tablet?s=biz&cs=555

Also, I want to apologize to the Tablet fans out there for not posting for so long. Reorgs, moving buildings, and Windows 7 work have all conspired against blogging here.

I will say that if you are impressed by the "touch features" in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7. Now if only we could convince more OEMs that Windows Touch Technology is going to drive their sales.

After getting our batteries replaced, I haven't had any issues with the replacement. However, I've seen quite a few calls for batteries go by on the grapevine.

Now, I find this post from the Lenovo blog "Inside the Box". Lenovo is extending the warranty and replacing batteries that fail testing.

"The Battery Verification Tool will tell you if your battery failed due to this issue, and if so, will direct you to the site where you can request a replacement.

Note: This issue is not related to previous safety recalls and does not pose a safety hazard."

P.S. I'm deep into planning/early milestones for Windows 7. I apologize for the lack of posts. Sucky code name huh?

Windows Experience is hosting their regular monthly MVP chat Thursday, June 21, 2007 at 10am Pacific.

"The audience for this chat will be mostly our worldwide Windows Shell MVPs, but a few others such as Tablet, Printing and IE may show up as well. "

I am planning on being on the chat, so if you have issues you'd like to have answered, either a) contact me directly through the Email link above, or b) pass your question on to an MVP like Rob Bushway, Dennis Rice, any of the Heiny family, and they'll be sure to get on the chat, right y'all??

I *think* this is the page the chat will appear on, but I'm not 100% sure.

Doesn't sound too interesting, from what little detail is in the article.

https://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,62014041,00.htm

"We wanted to wait for Vista and the Santa Rosa [Centrino Pro] ultra-low voltage platform,"

I have received valuable feedback from you regarding form factors, "must-have" components and usability, which I will be passing back up to our Business Development team.

I hope you had as good and productive a show as I did.

BTW, if you haven't already, please check out the Silverlight + Ink hands-on lab which can be found here.

Thanks to a program manager who finally asked the question, and to the Lenovo System Engineer who answered, I now know the secret. And I'm sharing with you.

If your system is up-to-date with System Update, you can press Fn-F5 to bring up the "Radio Dashboard" and control the status of all 3 radios in an x60T.

I wonder if turning off WWAN and Bluetooth will significantly impact my battery life, which currently hovers around 3 hours (full brightness, WLAN on).

I am assuming battery life will improve, perhaps by an hour, given the presumed power consumption of two radio transmitters.

I'm looking forward to seeing you, perhaps for the last time in-person.

You see, after Windows Vista shipped, reorganizations happened that effectively cut Tablet's participation in conferences to zero. In fact, there is no separate "Mobile and Tailored PC" group anymore, we're all just Windows!

Problem statement:
I just bought a system with 4GB of physical RAM in it. The BIOS posts 4GB, but Windows tells me that I have anywhere from 2.75 - 3.5GB of RAM. Where is the rest of my RAM?

Summary:
If you are running 32-bit Windows, you must live with it. You will not ever see all 4GB of RAM you've paid for.

If you are running 64-bit Windows, you may have to live with it. Depending on your motherboard's chipset, your system may support memory remapping. If so, you will be able to use all 4GB of RAM.

Detailed:
Due to an architectural decision made long ago, if you have 4GB of physical RAM installed, Windows is only able to report a portion of the physical 4GB of RAM (ranges from ~2.75GB to 3.5GB depending on the devices installed, motherboard's chipset & BIOS).

This behavior is due to "memory mapped IO reservations". Those reservations overlay the physical address space and mask out those physical addresses so that they cannot be used for working memory. This is independent of the OS running on the machine.

Significant chunks of address space below 4GB (the highest address accessible via 32-bit) get reserved for use by system hardware:

• BIOS – including ACPI and legacy video support

• PCI bus including bridges etc.

• PCI Express support will reserve at least 256MB, up to 768MB depending on graphics card installed memory

What this means is a typical system may see between ~256MB and 1GB of address space below 4GB reserved for hardware use that the OS cannot access. Intel chipset specs are pretty good at explaining what address ranges gets reserved by default and in some cases call out that 1.5GB is always reserved and thus inaccessible to Windows.

When looking at memory in systems (be it desktop or notebook) there are three questions to ask that will tell you the maximum amount of memory your O/S will be able to use:

1. What O/S Edition have you installed?

a. 32-bit Windows is limited to a maximum of 4GB and cannot see any pages above 4GB.

b. 64-bit Windows can use between 8GB and 128GB depending on SKU.

2. What address range can your processor actually access?

a. Typically that’ll be 40-bit addressing today for x64 (Intel EM64T/AMD64), but older processors may be limited to 36-bit or even 32-bit

3. Can your system’s chipset map memory above 4GB?

a. Mobile chipsets on sale today cannot (but that may change with time)

b. Newer workstations (which use chipsets developed for single or multi-proc servers) usually can.

Windows can remap memory from below 4GB to above 4GB and use it there, however, that relies on the three points above:

1. Can Windows access memory above 4GB?

a. 32-bit – NO

b. 64-bit – Maybe (due to chipset limitations)

2. Can your processor access memory above 4GB?

a. If it’s recent then it might, and if it’s either AMD64 or EM64T it’s almost certain

3. Does your chipset allow pages to be remapped above 4GB?

a. Probably not – and that’s what’s catching people who install 64-bit Vista to work around point 1 – they find they still cannot see above 4GB

In some cases, OEMs may be able to tweak their BIOS to reserve less memory for platform use, but we’re not talking a huge difference (ie, 100’s of MBs).

In the end a 32-bit OS and/or application can only, ever, handle 4GB of memory at a time, the AWE stuff just swaps chunks of memory in and out of that 4GB space, thus fooling the application and OS into using more space than it can “see”.

Physical Address Extension (PAE), extends the physical address space to 36-bits if your HW supports this. For most operations, the processor execution units will only see 32-bit addresses, the MMU will take care of the translation to 36bit addresses. No swapping here, only page translations (which are used regardless of PAE being on or not), this is a fundamental feature of any virtual memory operating system.

The OS and apps only see 32-bit addresses because the registers are limited to 32-bits (hence the “32-bit” architecture nomenclature). These are linear addresses which are extended to 36-bits in the translation to physical addresses, but they never show up in registers since there’s no room. It’s all internal until the address lines coming out of the chip are toggled. Thus my comment above about “if your H/W supports this (PAE)". I’m not going into how that works…

So, the OS can happily handle up to 64 GB of memory for 32-bit PAE-able systems.

Hope this helps explain the whole, ‘Why can’t I see 4 Gig of RAM in my system?” thing…

BTW – This does not change for Vista either…

references:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

HWJunkie DL (MSFT internal)

Bob Heath (original author of this summary material)

Last week, I was in class (Debugging .NET Applications, by John Robbins) and got a little annoyed at my Tablet not having any wireless connectivity. I mean, it connected in the office, why not here?

Poking around some, I found out why I wasn't getting any connectivity outside of my office. If you go to:

Control Panel >> Network & Sharing >> Manage Network Connections >> *wireless connection* >> Properties >> Configure button >> Advanced tab >> Wireless Mode property

You'll find a list of values. In my case, the value was set to 1) 802.11a. I changed it to 6) 802.11 a/b/g and voila! I had wireless connectivity again. The property must have been set this way because I clean-installed Windows Vista instead of upgrading the Windows XPSP2 that came with it.

And why did I have wireless in my office? My building has been upgraded and there must be 802.11a spoken in my building, but not others yet.