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Microsoft’s terms for licensing Windows have for many years, if not always, restricted the use that Windows will make of a computer’s resources. This hasn’t gone completely unnoticed, but neither has it been much concern. The limits on such things as the number of simultaneous network connections are high enough not to matter much in practice for computers used at home or in small businesses. However, in these days when even home users are encouraged to regard 1GB of RAM as minimal and might easily think to spend on several gigabytes, how well are they warned that 32-bit editions of Windows Vista are licensed only for 4GB and will likely not use all of that?
On that particular count, though Microsoft does document the 4GB limit, there seems to be no clear statement that this is a license restriction, as opposed to being a technical constraint that is impossible to surmount or at least too difficult for the price. The license terms, presented as an agreement, do not trouble even to mention the word memory.
Vista has a formal scheme of license values through which Microsoft specifies how much Windows will do for the licensee.