I Smell bulls**t

[Denis O]

Just bought a Fujitsu Siemens V5535 Laptop as a Christmas pressie from a well known online "direct" seller. The spec of the machine showed 1Gb of RAM and as it was running Vista I felt it would be better to go for the larger RAM. All inclusive price of £299 and very well reveiwed.

Once it arrived I set everything up in readiness for wrapping in nice chrissy paper. During the set up process I noticed in properties for My Computer the RAM was showing as 768mb and not 1Gb as advertised. On checking with the companies customer service I was told that because VISTA is using ram it will only show what is available I tried to argue that it should show what's installed as opposed to whats available but the stazi on the other end of the line wouldn't have it. Eventually I gave up.

I checked on my XP desktop and sure enough it showed 512mb RAM which is what's installed. I then checked my Vista Samsung Laptop which has 2Gb and low and behold it showed 2048mb, again, which is what's installed.

It seems to me that the seller is pulling a fast one by only including 768 Mb instead of the advertised 1024Mb and then when they get the queries they bullshit their way around it. At this price level I would suspect that most buyers would probably not know there way around a computer so would never notice they had only 3/4's of the RAM they paid for.

So is it bull or is there a way that the RAM would show less than is actually installed.

[FunkyNige]

Denis O said:

So is it bull or is there a way that the RAM would show less than is actually installed.

Reckon it's bull, my Dell is showing the 2048MB of RAM that I paid for on Vista Home premium.

[fredf]

Is 256MB being shared with the graphics card? I'm not sure how Vista reports this.

[Kinky]

Or perhaps there is a gig in there - made up of 256k cards - and 1 is not working?

Highly unlikely I know - but worth checking just in case.

K

[David Godfrey]

fredf said:

Is 256MB being shared with the graphics card? I'm not sure how Vista reports this.

Looking at the spec from Here

website said:

Video Card: SiS Mirage 3+ Graphics

Video Card Interface: Integrated

Video Card Memory: 256 MB

Video Card Memory Type: Shared

I'd say that is right on the money.

Edited by David Godfrey on Sunday 9th December 12:35

[sgrimshaw]

Why not simply remove cover and see what's installed?

What does the BIOS report?

Edited by sgrimshaw on Sunday 9th December 12:42

[TheLearner]

David Godfrey said:

fredf said:

Is 256MB being shared with the graphics card? I'm not sure how Vista reports this.

Looking at the spec from Here

website said:

Video Card: SiS Mirage 3+ Graphics

Video Card Interface: Integrated

Video Card Memory: 256 MB

Video Card Memory Type: Shared

I'd say that is right on the money.

Bingo. Machine is as advertised.

This is why ram stealer IGP solutions make little baby jebus cry.

Edited by TheLearner on Sunday 9th December 15:41

[PJ S]

Sounds like Vista is reporting System RAM, and not what's installed. Given 256 is dedicated to the GPU, then the OS has 768 left to make use of.

[off_again]

fredf said:

Is 256MB being shared with the graphics card? I'm not sure how Vista reports this.

Yep.

Windows will read the available memory and will see that there is 768MB and the remaining 256MB for the video card. Its a common system used by the cheaper laptops to reduce the number of components and size of the motherboards. Nowt wrong with this, but probably the thing to do is pop over to Crucial and get a memory upgrade. Given that memory is dirt cheap at the moment, get as much as you can and stick it in. You will be surprised as to that impact it will have.

Edited to add:

Just had a peak at Crucial - can take a maximum of 2GB (remember 256MB shared for the video card) at a total expense of £35! Not bad:

http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/listparts.aspx?mod...

Edited by off_again on Sunday 9th December 14:05