[1] The process of mapping an application's virtual address space to physical memory under AWE is known as "windowing", and is similar to the overlay concept of other environments.
AWE is beneficial to certain data-intensive applications, such as database management systems and scientific and engineering software, that need to manipulate very large data sets while minimizing paging.
On 32-bit systems, AWE depends on Physical Address Extension support when reserving memory above 4 GB.
[5] Additional restrictions on the maximum amount of memory addressable thorough AWE are imposed by the Windows licensing scheme.
[6] An article published in Dr. Dobb's Journal in 2004 noted that memory allocated using Address Windowing Extensions will not be written to the pagefile, and suggested that AWE regions could therefore be used as a way of protecting sensitive application data such as encryption keys.