The Safely Remove Hardware mechanism is by no means something new to Windows Vista. In fact the feature has only survived into Vista with little to no enhancements. Essentially, Safely Remove Hardware is an integer part of the Vista model for managing Plug and Play devices, designed to notify the operating system that a certain item will be removed. The feature will make sure that there is no more interaction between Windows Vista and the Plug and Play hardware attached in order to streamline the removal of specific devices without having to shut down the operating system and without leading to loss of data.

“Some Plug and Play devices can be installed or removed while the system is running. For example, USB, IEEE 1394, and PC Card devices can be added to and removed from a fully powered system. When such hardware is added or removed, (more…)

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One of the core differences between 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista is of course how much system memory the two variants of Microsoft’s latest operating systems can use. Users have to understand that Microsoft alone limited 32-bit Vista to a maximum of 4 GB of RAM while taking the high-end editions of 64-bit Vista up to 128 GB of RAM. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft could have tailor fitted both 32-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP to address well in excess of 4 GB of system memory, but didn’t. The best argument related to the possibility of introducing support for over 4 GB of RAM with x86 Vista and XP is the fact that Microsoft does feature 32-bit Window operating systems that do it. Case in point Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32 GB of physical RAM), Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1, Enterprise Edition(64 GB of physical RAM) and Windows Server 2003 SP1, Datacenter Edition (128 GB of physical RAM). All these server side Windows operating systems are 32-bit platforms.

So why hasn’t the same been done with Windows Vista? Well, just because the 32-bit server operating systems can support in excess of 32-bit of RAM does not mean that it is the ideal solution. Far from it in fact, it is something more of a hack. (more…)

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