Chapter 4/ System Briefing

lines. Microsoft desperately wanted a foothold in this market, and the only

way to do so was to demonstrate to corporate buyers that their OS ran on

"grown-up" hardware.

To give you an idea of just how pervasive tliis mindset is, tliere've been instances where en¬

gineers from Intel found ways to increase substantially the performance of Microsaft applica¬

tions, and the developers at Microsoft turned around and snubbed them. In Tim Jackson's

book, Inside Intel, the author describes how the Intel engineers approached the application

guys at Microsoft with an improvement that would allow Excel to run eight times faster. The

response that Intel received: "People buy our applications because of the new features."

Then again, as a developer, there are valid reasons for distancing yourself

from the hardware that your code is running on. Portability is a long-term

strategic asset. In the software industry, dependency can be hazardous. If your

hardware vendor, for whatever reason, takes a nosedive, you can rest assured

that you'll be next in line. Furthermore, hardware vendors (just like soft¬

ware vendors) can become pretentious and cop an altitude if they realize that

they're the only game in town. To protect itself, a software company has to be

prepared to switch platforms, and this requires the product's architecture to

accommodate change.

>-

Note: Throughout this chapter, I make frequent use of the Windows kernel debugger to

illustrate concepts. If you're notalready familiar with thistcol, please skip ahead to the

next chapter and read through the pertinent material.

Physical Memory under Windows

To see the amount of physical memory installed on your machine's mother¬

board, open a command prompt and issue the following statement:

C:\>systeminfo | findstr "Total Physical Memory"

Total Physical Memory: 1,021 MB

Available Physical Memory: 740 MB

If you're so inclined, you can also crank up an instance of the Task Manager

and select the Performance tab for a more visually appealing summary (Fig¬

ure 4.1).