Windows normally makes 2GB of address space available to an application - in other words an application believes it can allocate up to 2GB of memory, less the space it's already occupying, and Windows will provide it. It's up to the Windows Memory Manager to determine whether this 2GB quantity can be allocated from available RAM (physical memory) or from hard drive space appearing to be memory (virtual memory in the paging file). This management by Windows is unknown to the program using the memory.
So Photoshop reports how much of that available 2GB is not currently being used for any function by the program, hence is still available. But it doesn't know anything about where that memory is coming from.
Behind the scenes, Windows makes the amount up in a different way on the two computers, and because Windows does know how its memory complement is being put together, it can show you different figures to what Photoshop knows about.
Last edited by Platypus; September 11th, 2008 at 06:28 AM.
Pleased to have been a Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) 2007/8, 2008/9
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