Ram question

[Q Section]

Hello Everyone

A quick question:
In a computer that has an on-board video card with 32MB and the computer has 384MB of ram - will the Ram listing show all 384MB or will it ever show only 352MB of ram? The computer store says it shows 352MB because the computer uses 32MB of ram for the display. We have not heard of this before. The person has an AMD Athalon 2200 cpu, XP home, Asus motherboard and a Geoforce 2 on-board video card. The video card is not a PCI add-in.

We think the computer store is trying to pass off a bad memory stick. There is one 128MB stick and one 256MB stick installed.

Thank you for the valuable information.

[Pieter_Arntz]

Hi QSection,

Take a good look at the specs of that computer.
The video memory could be "shared"
What is Shared Video Memory? (http://malektips.com/gen0040.html)

Regards,

Pieter

[Q Section]

A new lesson for us! Thank you for that answer. Your idea appears to be the answer that makes sense. Now we know. BTW - before we read your answer we did an experiment. First we took one ram stick out, left the 128MB stick in and turned the computer on to see what the ram listing was. It said 96MB. then we swapped sticks to the 256MB one. Then the display said 224MB. Then we knew that both sticks had no problem. Your answer made good sense. For the newbies out there - to find what the computer recognizes go to Start>Settings>Control Panel>System>General and look down.

Thank you Pieter

[Pieter_Arntz]

Hi QSection,

My pleasure.

You still need to take a good look at the specs.
If the GeForce has it´s own memory, then there could be a setting wrong in the BIOS.
If this is true you are wasting 64MB of memory.

Regards,

Pieter

[Q Section]

OK - will be checked. :D