<<This will force Internet Explorer to run in its own separate portion of RAM. This will eat into your system resources, but it prevents the browser from inflicting a crash on other applications.>>
There seems to be some confusion on how Windows manages memory.
In Win98xx and earlier, the complete memory space is shared by all applications, including the Operating System. Because of this memory sharing, an application can potentially corrupt another applications memory space. There are no safeguards administered by the OS, such as protected memory space, to prevent this from happening. It is completely up to each application to be "bug" free to avoid the possibility of corrupting another applications memory space. Therefore, if any one of the applications running has an error and crashes, it has the potential to crash any other application running, including the OS.
Win2000 is based on the very robust NT kernel that was developed for the corporate world. It has safeguards protecting each application from each other, including the OS. Each application runs in it's own protected memory space. In this environment, the OS will trap any application that tries to reference memory outside it's own memory space and halt that application. If the application crashes it should not affect the other applications or the OS. Unfortunately, it is not 100% without fault, but the probability of a complete system crash is remote.
Charts showing reliability of Win98 vs Win2k: microsoft.com
An explanation of the differences from Windows 1.0 through Windows XP: extremetech.com
Regards,
Nick |
