New laptop ram question

[happyhero]

Hi my daughter went to PC World yesterday and this PC http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/859051 was on offer for £399 and she bought it. I told her the ram was a little low at 512 and they told her they would double it to 1024 for £45 so she went for that. It comes with the new Windows Vista Home basic.

They also said they would double the ram for only £20 if she took out a years breakdown insurance on it. I don't agree with the insurance but she took it anyway because they said she could cancel it afterwards and still have the ram for £20 so seems ok to me.

Some of the above may not be relevant to the question I am going to ask but at least it puts everyone fully in the picture as to what went on.

Now I know when you talk about PC hard drives you will often find that you buy say an 80 GB hard drive and yet when you check it out on the PC it will show less, ie 78 GB but in my experience the ram has always displayed as what it is, i.e. buy 512 and you will see 512 if for example you go to control panel/system but when I looked at my daughters it is displaying something like 864 (cant get my hands on it at this moment to check the exact figure) which seems a bit odd to me, any ideas please?

Any advice appreciated.

 

[Igorian]

It's probably sharing some of the system memory with the graphic adaptor.

 

[pheonix]

The notebook is showing less memory because the on-board graphics are eating up some of it.
By default most notebook bios's are set to use a fair chunk of whatever amount of ram is installed for on-board graphics.

Upon checking the Toshiba website it states that the notebook model you have the on-board graphics may use up to 256mb of system memory leaving 768mb for Windows to work with (1024-256=768Mb).

The only way to increase the amount of available memory for Windows is to change the default bios settings on how much system memory the on-board graphics can use.

 

[happyhero]

Thanks pheonix for your answers on both my posts, they are very informative and it is disappointing to hear what they mean, had we known we may have gone for a higher model.

Seems very hard these days to be able to buy a machine with confidence when there are so many almost concealed details, ie you read the ram and assume thats what you will get not that other things will pinch a bit and you end up with less than you thought. Seems that the same goes for the other parts unless you really know your stuff.

Anyway thanks for all the help, at least we know where we are now.

 

[pheonix]

I know what you mean hence the reason I put in a lot of effort to reseach any product I'm thinking of buying.

If it's any consolation the notebook you have can take up to a maximum of 2Gb ram.

See here

Though if your ever tempted to upgrade to Vista Premium I think the machine may struggle a little with the fancy graphics it uses not to mention the processing power required may shorten the battery life.