August 19th, 2004

Myth: In order to use AWE, you must enable PAE

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) does not require PAE. I don’t know why some people claim that it does, since it is so easy to demonstrate otherwise. Take a program that uses AWE. If you don’t have one handy, you can use the one that comes in MSDN as a sample program that demonstrates how to use AWE. Grant yourself “Lock Pages in Memory” privileges and run the program. Observe that it works. Now remove the /PAE switch from your boot.ini, reboot, and run the program again. Observe that it still works.

Myth disproved by direct experimentation and observation.

Category
Old New Thing
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Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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