weird laptop memory

  • Thread starter Thread starter Christo
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Christo

its meant to have 512mb ram and it says it has 480 MB

why is this?

i have built my own PC's which have 512 modules and they appear as 512, not
480?


any solutions greatly appreciated

Thanks

Chris
 
its meant to have 512mb ram and it says it has 480 MB

why is this?

i have built my own PC's which have 512 modules and they appear as 512, not
480?


any solutions greatly appreciated

Thanks

Chris
Click to expand...

Some of the low end systems use a "shared" video memory system to cut
costs. By that, I mean instead of having dedicated video memory for
the video chipset, it steals some system memory to use as video
memory. Looks like about 32megs was taken for it. Some laptops let
you dial down the amount of RAM that's borrowed for this in the BIOS
setup, if you find you don't want to dedicate that much memory to it.
Even if the BIOS lets you do it, you can't reduce the usage to zero,
as the video subsystem does need some RAM to work, so you'll never get
full system access to all your RAM. Some of it will always be taken
up by the RAM.

Performance on such video subsystems is snail slow in 3D, and pretty
crappy for some 2D applications as well, but it's good enough for
basic office type apps like word processing, emailing and web surfing.
 
MCheu said:
Some of the low end systems use a "shared" video memory system to cut
costs. By that, I mean instead of having dedicated video memory for
the video chipset, it steals some system memory to use as video
memory. Looks like about 32megs was taken for it. Some laptops let
you dial down the amount of RAM that's borrowed for this in the BIOS
setup, if you find you don't want to dedicate that much memory to it.
Even if the BIOS lets you do it, you can't reduce the usage to zero,
as the video subsystem does need some RAM to work, so you'll never get
full system access to all your RAM. Some of it will always be taken
up by the RAM.

Performance on such video subsystems is snail slow in 3D, and pretty
crappy for some 2D applications as well, but it's good enough for
basic office type apps like word processing, emailing and web surfing.
Click to expand...

gotcha

didnt think of that,

although you say 32mb graphics, it is actually meant to be 64, maybe the
number in the BIOS setup specifies 32 mb and not 64

I have my PC for my games, this laptop was bought for 54mbps wireless :)

Thank you for the info
 
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