OH man, Norton Antivirus? I'm not at all kidding when I suggest that that may have had an equal hand in the destruction of your Windows install. Norton and McAfee are popular only because computer stores and PC makers get a kickback for including it on PCs and encouraging their customers to buy a subscription. Unfortunately if Vista was still the big hot thing, Microsoft Security Essentials may not have been out yet. I was using AVG at the time.
I'd also managed to forget about Microsoft licensing XP to be sold on systems with only one gig of ram. My bet is that it would have worked with more, but that's only because at the time XP was really close to ten years old and it hadn't been licensed that way before, so it was more of an OEM sales limitation than a technical one. If you install more than 32 gigs of ram on a Windows 2008 R2 Standard machine, however, it'll list that it only has 32 gigs of physical memory in the task manager, because that limit was added in at the point of original sale.
(Somewhere, on a different forum that's technically qualified for it, I'm sure there's a really good discussion about the merits and demerits of OS licensing that allows/disallows certain numbers of users and certain quantities of
It would be very interesting to hear from early Mac users on this topic, but my guess is that many of those folks were the pragmatists who have long moved on and aren't too worried about old machines -- at least the ones who aren't already here.
I'd also managed to forget about Microsoft licensing XP to be sold on systems with only one gig of ram. My bet is that it would have worked with more, but that's only because at the time XP was really close to ten years old and it hadn't been licensed that way before, so it was more of an OEM sales limitation than a technical one. If you install more than 32 gigs of ram on a Windows 2008 R2 Standard machine, however, it'll list that it only has 32 gigs of physical memory in the task manager, because that limit was added in at the point of original sale.
(Somewhere, on a different forum that's technically qualified for it, I'm sure there's a really good discussion about the merits and demerits of OS licensing that allows/disallows certain numbers of users and certain quantities of
It would be very interesting to hear from early Mac users on this topic, but my guess is that many of those folks were the pragmatists who have long moved on and aren't too worried about old machines -- at least the ones who aren't already here.