Are Future Shop Liars? - You tell me

[QueeNiE]

Well, for several months now, my mom's laptop has been running slowely, and she has asked me to find out why.  It is currently running vista.  On the sticker on the side, it says "1GB DDR2 RAM," yet when I run Bios, and the DxDiag, AND the control panel, they all say ~750mb of RAM.  Did future shop lie to us?  Did they sell us a bad laptop?


One last thing I would like to point out before you give your opinions, is that in Bios it says ~250mb of Video memory.  Adding that to 750 = 1000 (1 GB) obviously.  My dad seems to think that they are sperated, but I think that the 250 is just a partition of the 750 used for video memory.

So is future shop lying to me?  Should I sue for millions of dollars?  Am I super shmecksi?  You tell me.


Thanks, Brock.

[KnacK]

Brock,

You are correct in stating that the video mem is getting subtracted from the main RAM.

You didn't get screwed.

[QueeNiE]

They sold it to me as a one gig, so wouldn't that mean that I am in fact getting screwed?


I'm probably just being stupid in not understanding what your saying

[KnacK]

You do have one gig of RAM.

But, 250 mb of that is tied up for video memory since you have an integrated video controller.

[y00tz]

'shared video ram' is one of those phrases computer store throw around like it's a plus...

[KiLo]

Bottom line is though that 1 gig of RAM really is not enough for Vista to run on. And considering that 250 megs of that is going to video then you have even less RAM for the OS.

[lekky]

Do they still say 1GB when they actually mean 1000MB too?

[KiLo]

That would be a lie since 1GB=1024 MB.

[lekky]

I know it used to be the case that if you were getting a HD, they would use 1GB=1000 MB.

[sk89q]

I run Vista on 765 MB of RAM :/ but I have Aero and a number of services disabled.

[Eiii]

I run Vista on 765 MB of RAM :/ but I have Aero and a number of services disabled.

I still will never understand why you do that.

[sk89q]

Because it's too late to install XP. I'd have to spend over a week reinstalling software, and not to mention transferring over lots of customization data.

I wait for SP1, badly. Vista's slow-butt copy/move & folder access routines are exceptionally annoying.

[KnacK]

why oh why are you reinstalling Vista.....