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Missing RAM. Reserved memory?

FirebrandFirebrand Registered User regular
edited July 2007 in Help / Advice Forum
So I helped my parents get themselves a new computer today as their old one finally broke down. We settled on a budget computer, with 1 gig RAM to start with.

After a lengthy installation process, I enter Vista but can't help to notice the system feels a bit sluggish. I open up Properties for Computer, and it says the system only has 768 MB RAM. I reboot, enter the BIOS setup and there it says I have 1024 MB.

I then run memtest86 from a bootable CD and it says 768 MB, but it also reports 340 MB of "ResvdMem". What is it that has reserved 1/4 of the total system RAM? Memory map is "E820-Std" if that helps.

Computer is an Acer T180, with AMD Sempron 3500+ 2.2 GHz, 2 x 512 MB RAM.

Firebrand on

Posts

  • Phoenix-DPhoenix-D Registered User regular
    edited July 2007
    Does your budget computer have integrated video? If it does, that's probably the video card memory.

    Phoenix-D on
  • FirebrandFirebrand Registered User regular
    edited July 2007
    Yes, that could be it, it does have integrated graphics. But that sounds like an awful lot of memory to steal? Motherboard is some kind of nForce (don't have the specifications in front of me), graphics chip is GeForce 6100.

    Firebrand on
  • PheezerPheezer Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited July 2007
    That's a pretty average amount of RAM to reserve off for a graphics card. 256 MB is not by any means outlandish.

    Pheezer on
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  • FirebrandFirebrand Registered User regular
    edited July 2007
    Indeed, looking now in the video settings in Vista it says I have 384 MB of video memory: 256 MB of "dedicated video memory" and 127 MB of "shared system memory". Is there any way to adjust these numbers? The system won't be used for gaming, at all. Most demanding graphics task will probably be the Aero interface.

    Firebrand on
  • kevbotkevbot Registered User regular
    edited July 2007
    Usually you can set the amount of RAM reserved for the graphics card in the system BIOS... if not there, there should be a setting in the video driver.

    Is there an extra BIOS screen on system startup? It probably says something like "nVidia video BIOS" if it's there. If there is a key combination mentioned there, you might try that one out.

    kevbot on
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  • FirebrandFirebrand Registered User regular
    edited July 2007
    Yep, found the setting called "Frame Buffer Size" and set it to 64 MB, seems like that should be enough for Vista desktoping (no?). I now have 958 MB free memory, which almost adds up to 1024 when you add the reserved video memory. Video adapter setting still reports an additional 223 MB "shared system memory", but it seems like that's just taken from the pool of available of memory.

    Thanks for the help, guys.

    Firebrand on
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