Werid RAM

Hey, i recently got a new laptop and it is suposed to have 1gb RAM but when i look it says 896mb :S Im confused…has dell ripped me of or something or is it just randomness? Also does anyone know if vista home premium will still work? As it says a min of 1gb but if i only got 896mb thats quite a big difference :(

they probably have the ram sharing memory with the video memory like i have on my system. until i can get a vid card. so check the BIOS i think thats what it is. and my vista prem, ran fine with that setting they do that because the min video memory requirement is 128megs. you will however have a hard time installing progs and updates… there just simply is not enough buffer room.. when installing an update vista uses about 1.3 to 1.5 gigs of memory, i have 2 gigs. before the upgraded mem. i could not install updates. period.

Thanks that really reassures me :D Except the bit about need 1.3-.1.5gb ram for updating :right:

some systems judge gigs diffrently. i have a portable harddrive and its 80 gigs but some computers read it at 77 or something

tonzofgunz25 wrote: some systems judge gigs diffrently. i have a portable harddrive and its 80 gigs but some computers read it at 77 or something

Yeah when it comes to HDDs, they're labelled using the format 1GB = 1 000 000 000 bytes, but a computer uses 1GB = 1024^3 bytes = 1 073 741 824 bytes.

This makes a GB look like 0.931 GB in the computer ;)

No offense meant to anyone but you guys got it all wrong. You are probably using an on board graphics card which means that it does reserve some of the RAM for itself and doesn't show up along with the rest that your system uses. Phone the manufacturer of your laptop and they will tell you exactly the same. I'm a technical call center consultant and I see this on a weekly bases.

Hope this helps man. Peace out! :radio:

Well guys you all have a reasonable idea and it is right but no solution offered, ok firstly it is you integrated graphics card in the laptop which is using the memory, you can reduce its memory use in bios by going into the chipset options, or one of the options, or graphics options, you can disable it completely but that obviously will stop your comp running anything visual on your computer in windows, but generally you can reduce it to 64megs , 32 megs, 16 or disable it completely.

So if you don;t use the laptop for playing games (which i wouldn't expect since it's an integrated graphics card) go into bios and change how much memory it uses.

I'm confident you now what bios is so yeh ill leave it from here

Yeah, most probobly the memory is being shared with video. This isn't only limited to onboard graphics, as some "dedicated" video cards have a lovely thing called TurboCache, which means it might say its 512MB video card, but only 256 is on the actual video card and the other 256 is redirected from your RAM.

So yeah, play around in your BIOS considering that if you do take away memory from the graphics it will be slower than what your used to.