Address Windowing Extensions

Address Windowing Extension ( AWE, Eng. Expansion ( by ) addressing window) is a Microsoft Windows programming interface to support more than 4 GB of memory on i386 - compatible 32 -bit platforms.

AWE allows a program to reserve physical address ranges and display this in the virtual address space of the process. If the reserved memory area is larger than can be displayed at one time, the mapping must be changed in order to access the other memory areas. It can always be accessed only on a section of the reserved address range. This as an "overlay " or " windowing " known technique is, in principle, comparable to that offered under DOS EMS memory.

With the AWE up to 236 bytes ( = 64 GB) memory to be addressed.

Usable memory for Windows 2000 Server 32 -bit versions:

  • Windows 2000 Standard Server: 4 GB
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server: 8GB
  • Windows 2000 Datacenter Server: 64GB.

Usable memory for Windows Server 2003 32- bit versions:

  • Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition: 4 GB
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition: 32 GB
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition: 64 GB

Windows XP and Windows Vista ( 32- bit versions) are limited for compatibility reasons (drivers and PCI subsystem ) to 4 GB. The AWE is as dependent on the Physical Address Extension (PAE ) than the AWE functions can not allocate memory (RAM) 4 GB without PAE technique.

IA-32 Expanded memory
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