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.

superscaper

Does it have a graphics card, onboard graphics (and even some cheap graphics cards) will share the RAM. As for "losing" hard disc space, that's because different companies (eg Microsoft and Hard Drive manufacturers) aren't consistent in their units and all of them aren't using the international prefix standards (see my sig.).

happyhero

superscaper wrote: »

Does it have a graphics card, onboard graphics (and even some cheap graphics cards) will share the RAM. As for "losing" hard disc space, that's because different companies (eg Microsoft and Hard Drive manufacturers) aren't consistent in their units and all of them aren't using the international prefix standards (see my sig.).

Cheers for the info superscaper, so is there any simple way to check if this is going on and find the missing ram?

And from this could I deduce that had she not upgraded the ram she would have had even less than 512 for her machine, if that is the case it sounds terribly low for a new machine when a lot of machines are now supplied with a 1024 as standard?

Also seems bad to me, that what you buy is not quite what you think it is, as other cards etc in the machine are stealing some of what you think you get from the sales ticket details.

superscaper

Best thing would be to check the make/model of graphics card/onboard chip. Either with the hardware driver list in the properties of my computer or use Lavalys Everest (there should still be a lite free or trial version) which I've found to be fantastic in giving you all the hardware details of a pc.