memory requirements

[bolonick]

Any estimate of what would be a reasonable amount of memory for processing reasonably large (say 30Mpx) images in version 8 of Picture Window?
I am currently running a 32 bit version of Windows 7 with 4 gigabytes of memory in my computer and am wondering if I switch to 64 bit for version 8 if I will have enough memory, since I can't put anymore than 4 gigs in this box.

[jsachs]

There is no absolute memory requirement -- all the images in the image browser and their masks, etc. are in memory at once, so if you have a very complicated workspace with lots of images and the images are large, you will need a lot of memory. As long as you don't go overboard, you should have room for quite a few 48-bit 30 megapixel images which only need about 180 MB or 0.18 GB each.

One of the problems with 32-bit Windows is that it never gives any process access to more than 2 GB of memory, so there could still be a benefit to using 64-bit Windows on a 4 GB computer, but Windows and other apps use a lot of that space as well. You always have to option of allocation more virtual memory swap space, but once you start swapping, performance drops quickly.

Bear in mind that at this point PWP 8 only runs on 64-bit Windows - there is no 32-bit version.