File Size and Ram

[cimoli]

My friend uses Office 2010. He has a mix of 7 computers, XP and Win8 machines in a lan.
The two XP have 8 mb ram and the win8 has 16 ram.

Our Access 2010 file size was 250 mb. The XP machines could not work with such a size.
This occurred over a few days.

On some screens, it went to the design mode. I found some temp tables that my friend made.
I moved them to another file and deleted them on the 1st file, bring the file size down
to 234 mb after compacting.

The 8 mb ram XP's have been fine the next 4 days with a smaller Access size.
We are replacing them with win8 machines with 16 mb ram.

Question: Is there a file size limit for Access 2010 ?
If adding 8 more ram, will all that ram be truly available to Access ?
I bet not.

 

[jrbarnett]

Hello

I am assuming that you mean 8Gb and 16Gb rather than Mb RAM. Any computer with 8 or 16Mb RAM were state of the art back in the early 1990s and certainly wouldn't run Windows XP let alone Windows 8.

The Access database .mdb and .accdb files have a maximum size of 2Gb each. The amount of RAM available to Access (or any other application) depends on the version of Windows you are running.
You don't have to have enough RAM in the computer to load it fully into memory on top of the operating system and Access, as Windows will automatically swap unneeded items between teh swap fle.

This is off topic for an Access forum but relevant here:
If you are running a 32 bit version of Windows, then no matter how much is installed in the motherboard, Windows will only see 4Gb (realistically about 3.5Gb) only use a maximum of 2Gb per application, swapping out to disk when needed.
If you are running a 64 bit operating system, no such limits appear and the full amount of RAM is available to applications. Use of the swapfile is again automatic.
You can tell if you are running 32 or 64 bit by right clicking on My Computer and choosing properties.

 

[lameid]

Since XP support is done, it is recommended you upgrade Windows anyways.

That said I think XP should work fine. Do you receive errors or what is happening?