On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 12:39:28AM +0000, Martin Jungowski wrote: > The total amoumt of accessible memory is 4GB (2^32 Bytes) but the total > amount of memory per process is limited to 2GB. That means that even on 64- > bit system and more than 4GB of total memory a 32-bit process cannot > access more than that, which is why a ZIP file larger than that can cause > trouble on any system. I highly doubt that Windows will be able to > decompress that file. Depending on the tool you use (built-in unzip tool? Why? It's not storing the whole file in memory, it's writing it out chunk-wise to a disk. Unzipping a file requires very little memory regardless of the size of it. Even info-zip can handle files of over 2Gb as long as the whole archive itself isn't 2Gb. This is _not_ a memory issue; it's a "32bit pointer" issue (historical limitation on unix before largefiles concept). As it happens, yes, the built-in XP zip program happily extracts all the files. -- rgds Stephen