Thunderbird 115.10 and newsgroups - present status

I made the mistake of upgrading to 115.10.1 (32 bit)

Mistake. Now I can only run T'bird or Edge and nothing else. Both together means Tbird is really sluggish.

Some of the older platforms, you couldn't put much RAM in them. My late-WinXP era machine (it died), could only hold 8GB DDR2, and the 8GB was only useful when I was running Windows 8.1 on it. That's because the WinXP was the 32 bit one.

The Asrock 4CoreDuo machine, could only do 2GB of DDR2 RAM total. It had an E7500 dual core CPU in it. Now, that's a tight fit. Pretty well useless. The 8GB example of the other machine, was much more accommodating.

On machines using DDR3, they stopped making DDR3 more than a year ago, and stock of quality upgrade materials is patchy. You can tell some of the RAM kits are "coming from under sofa cushions". I missed the opportunity to put another 2GB stick in the laptop. There were two generations of DDR3, and the rules are not the same for older versus newer DDR3 machines. There were plenty of "tempting" offers for the laptop, but most offers were "inappropriate". The CPU in the laptop, has no documentation... which is not a good thing to discover.

DDR4 and DDR5 are still available.

Your 115.10.1 (32 bit) could be hitting the limit of RAM that

This is to demonstrate some RAM limits.

PS S:\malloc> .\malloc32

PS S:\malloc> .\malloc <=== LargeAddressAware version, 3GB or so. My OS is 64 bit, so the limit could be slightly higher. LAA is a compile time option.

PS S:\malloc> .\malloc64 <=== 64-bit programs can use whatever is available

And that's only important, if Thunderbird is sluggish because it can't expand all that much as a 32 bit program.

So the first step, is seeing what is in the machine now, for RAM sticks. The memory info in Task Manager on windows is one place to look. This picture is of the 8GB deceased WinXP machine, using CPU-Z from cpuid.com . The portable version of the program is good enough.

I bought an upgrade package (*)from Novatech, Portsmouth back in 2011 which allowed them to sell a Win 7 Pro OEM disk, but I chose to install the 32 bit version back then because I still had an expensive Nikon slide scanner that did not have 64 bit drivers.

This has now upgraded my PC to a Win 10 Pro 32 bit installation which, AFAIK still only uses 3Gb out of the 4Gb installed. Adding another 4Gb ram is apparently pointless with a

(*) Gigabyte 880m M/B + 4Gb DDR3? + x6 1055T AMD Windows PRo 7 OEM Upgrade

Back in the day, if you had a 2GB video card, it ruined your available System RAM value.

Strictly speaking, a 32 bit OS could use the 64GB PAE mapping option that Intel invented in the Pentium III era. But each program would still have a 2GB limit, and so you could run 32 programs of 2GB each if your 64GB machine had a 32 bit OS that understands how to use PAE. A program like 32-bit Thunderbird, would still have a 2GB limit.

The hardware has the ability to hoist RAM. That means, if it wanted, it can have a chunk from 0-3GB, a 1GB "hole" for the busses, then lift the last gigabyte between

Such hoisting is done on 64 bit OSes. You would have RAM from 0-3GB, RAM from 4GB-5GB, for a total of 4GB of physical RAM mapped to the address space.

The rules have changed a bit for W10/W11, in that W10 being the last OS with a 32-bit version, when Win10 32-bit uses an 8GB video card, the video card does not cause the OS to die on the spot. It seems an 8GB video card, only 2GB of it is mapped. I don't know any more about it, except to watch for the behavior (of a video card apparently not being entirely mapped).

Paul

I do have an nVidia GEForce 210 video card with 1024MB ram, bought new in PC worlds sale in Jan 2015, but never installed. It says PCIe 2.0 on the box.

Manual says it needs a 300 watt power supply but elsewhere it says that it needs 18amps @ 12v.

The PS in my PC dates back to 1996-ish (I think) and says -

ADVANCE MPT-400

-12V 0.8A blue

-5V 0.5A white

Not withstanding the 12V deficiency of -3A, would installing this card release more PC ram for use by Win10 etc ?.

I may be tempting fate by installing this card. This power supply seems to be hanging on really well after so many yearsand its the PC that I use for online banking, ISA & SIPP stuff and I don't want it to expire in smoke.

Andrew

Yes, that is an old supply.

How can I tell ? It has a -5V output on it.

Supplies back then, had more robust lower rails. Whereas supplies today have a lot more +12V amps. The 5V @ 35A will run an AthlonXP, with margin. My Nforce2 board, runs the processor off +5V instead of from +12V. That's why the +12V is relatively lame.

The Geforce 210 is 31W TDP, and is slot powered. The Advance supply would not have a PCIe 2x3 or 2x4 power connector. That came later as a connector type.

The slot has two power rails. It has 3.3V and 12V. Using our vivid imaginations, we could assume 3.3V @ 3A for the RAM power. Leaving 21W from the load, to be satisfied by 12V @ 2A from the supply.

That means you have 12V @ 13A left.

You did not state what your processor was, and without a motherboard make and model, I can't even fake it by looking at the supported CPU table and picking out plumbs. If the current motherboard on that ancient PSU is at all modern, Intel has some pretty nasty behaviors, such as drawing 228W during the turbo interval. Older equipment does not behave that way. For example, I used to have an 89W Pentium4, and I measured and it drew 89W. Later, the Core2 era, the two Core2 65W processors I owned, one drew 36W, one drew 43W max. These were using different geometry silicon, so were not equal model numbers. On the newer stuff, you can turn off turbo, if there is a reason to be doing that.

If that's a 65W processor (like my E8400 Core2 example), then there would be no concern on a 12V @ 13A remaining output. You'd have enough room for a couple drives, a DVD, and 6A for the CPU.

But just generally speaking, it's a supply from a different era, and optimized for that era. That's why it has so much +5V on it.

I usually allocate 50W consumption on 3.3V and 5V, which covers chipset and DIMM consumption. That's if you were wanting to work out an estimate of "total system power". DIMM power is quoted/specified, using an "industry standard cycle mix". For example, a write cycle (writing one cache line, of a cache line burst), the DIMM might run at 4W for that cycle. Then drops back to 1W for some of the lamer cycles. We end up with an "averaged" consumption as our DIMM estimate. And the value is not 25W per DIMM, as some genius proposed years ago.

The "warmest" RAM, was RAMBUS, where one chip was active at a time, and connected via a high speed serial bus (the chips on the DIMM were in a "chain"). Those had heat spreaders riveted to them, for the purpose of moving a 4W hotspot, over more of the surface of the DIMM.

The RAM we use today, has uniform heat output over the chips, which is why putting metal plates on them is unnecessary. During "active" cycles, all the chips kick out heat. During "lame" cycles, the chips rest. And the chip averages out the thermals over time, to some value. Autorefresh (sleep) draws about 1 watt per DIMM.

I just toss in 50W or so, for the intangible portion of consumption. I've had idle computer numbers here, of 22W, so the number has dropped with generation. The 50W value might have been good in the SLI era (two PCIe slots for video, Northbridge chip draws a lot of power).

Paul

No. Ive used that card, It gives fast graphics but no more RAM

It wont suck full power just displaying winders.

If you want more ram fit more ram, or buy a better computer

I mentioned that above. I bought an upgrade package from Novatech Portsmouth (UK!) in 2011. M/B is Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H Processor is AMD Phenom? 6x 1055T

I don't know which version of the 1055T that I have because this article from 2010 says there are two, 125 watts and 95 watts

The version of the Geforce 210 that I bought is a silent one, without a fan, if that helps

You cannot fit 'more ram' to a 32-bit Windows installation.

The next computer will be an M4 Mac mini

You can't fit more RAM to those either, and it's silly money to buy the models that come with more RAM ... more SSD ... more cores ... faster NIC

But it should still be possible to connect my expensive Nikon coolscan 9000 slide scanner with a firewire port, via the correct combination of adapters to the mac.

I don't think it is possible to get a modern-ish pc with support for firewire

Well you can, but it wont use it...

I have windows XP installed on a 24GB ram machine here,.

But it wont use anything over 3GB

Isn't it time you grew up and put away childish things and got a 64 bit computer?

That isn't a pretty little MacToy?

Must be nice to have money to burn

Its not silly to buy the machine that is man enough for the jobs you want it to do.

I got away with 8GB until I needed a Windows VM and several other ram hungry apps running simultaneously.

It was trivial to add another 16GB - cost me £20 I think.

I used to run Nvidia graphics to play one online game. But this machines onboard graphics are good enough

It says it is Intel® Core™ i5-6600T CPU @ 2.70GHz × 4

Whatever the f*ck that is, it is *fast enough*.

It came with a 120GB SSD. All my data is on a 4TB server. I don't need local disk space.

In short this £250 refurbed HP desktop with linux Mint and an XP virtual box installation on it does everything I *need to do*.

As does its expensive cherry mechanical keyboard and 24" HD monitor.

I cant understand why anyone would still have a 32 bit install on their entire machine,.

My 32 bit XP VM has been ported from machine to machine. This is its 4th incarnation

I cant understand why anyone would buy overpriced built in obsolescence AppleCrap either.

Win10, Ryzen 5 3600, add-in firewire card, works fine here.

I've only had two machines with firewire (C series Dell laptop and a homebuilt multimedia PC) it was cool to get 400Mbps transfers between the two machines, long before 1Gbps ethernet was common, but not very practical.