Weird huh? That was also what I thought.
I got a complaint from a client that Sound Recorder in Microsoft Word did not work in some machines. We used Sound Recorder as one of the functionality in the Microsoft Word Add -In that we developed. Apparently this is a limitation of older version of Sound Recorder. it would not work in the machine mith memory more than 2 GB.
According to Wikipedia this is a design fault.
“On computers with more than 2 GB of RAM, after recording (but not when playing), Sound Recorder will return an error message saying there is not enough memory. This is a design fault of older versions of Sound Recorder and cannot be resolved except by reducing the amount of available physical memory. ” more
I read more about in stack overflow forum (sorry forgot the link
), this program was created back then in windows 98. Unfortunately the programmer use integer to store physical memory size. Despite the fact that it could be wrong, it does explain the problem. 32 bit integer would only accept maximum value of 2,147,483,647 which is exactly 2GB. Greater value would be evaluated as a negative number.
We couldn’t put the blame entirely on the programmer, since back then in windows 98 period computer memory does not normally exceed this number. Besides Windows 98 itself had problem in machine with large memory installed. Vista does not have this problem but the Sound Recorder has less features and only able to produce wma files. In addition to that, it does not seem to be integrated with Word anymore in some edition of the OS (CMIIW).
Hmm interesting error :D. What do you think?