# Upper limit on Wordpad documents?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/upper-limit-on-wordpad-documents/557587>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 18, 2010, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/upper-limit-on-wordpad-documents/557587 "2010-10-18T19:31:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\
**Post date:** [October 20, 2010, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/upper-limit-on-wordpad-documents/557587/21 "2010-10-20T09:33:12Z")

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> [@falcotron](#):
>
> There’s got to be a much faster way than that, even on Windows. That’s 4 log N tedious keystrokes, and I imagine the interface starts to lag on you.

It does 🙂

> [@](#):
>
> On any other OS, you can do it with one call to dd, or a simple one-line while loop using cat, in under a second. I know there aren’t as many useful console tools and batch syntax sucks, but something similar has to be doable.

Yes, I could have done it at the command prompt, but I didn’t.

> [@](#):
>
> I can’t remember off the top of my head whether Win64 processes get 40, 44, or 48 bits of user address space, but it’s definitely not 63.

Yes, see [here](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx), but that’s an OS limitation, not an application limitation, isn’t it? To misquote Bill Gates, 8TB (44 bits) should be enough for the next few years anyway.

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**Author:** ![falcotron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3ab097/32.png) [@falcotron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/falcotron)\
**Post date:** [October 20, 2010, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/upper-limit-on-wordpad-documents/557587/22 "2010-10-20T21:19:35Z")

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> [@Quartz](#):
>
> Yes, see [here](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx), but that’s an OS limitation, not an application limitation, isn’t it? To misquote Bill Gates, 8TB (44 bits) should be enough for the next few years anyway.

Well, yeah, it’s an OS limitation. And it’s one that an app can work around by doing its own paging (like Oracle being able to handle 16 TB databases on 32-bit Windows and Linux, or Visicalc being able to handle 1MB spreadsheets on 8-bit Apple II DOS). But I’m willing to bet Wordpad doesn’t do that.

On top of that, I believe RICHEDIT has a smaller limit, and an even smaller limit to what it can load up at one time. You can get around that by manually feeding it with a stream callback instead of just dumping in a whole file (which would also get rid of the lag you saw when your file got big), but I doubt Wordpad doesn’t that either.

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