Am I being fobbed off?

dazzer21

I bought a Packard Bell iStart computer from PCWorld online (I know, I should have known better...)

It's advertised on site as having 1024Mb RAM, 80Gb hard drive. It is showing that it has 768Mb physical RAM and 66Gb hard drive, 56Gb available. I'm using Vista Premium.

I understand that on the HD front, there is 8Gb reserved for recovery software, so with other bits an pieces on there, I guess that's probably correct. However, upon phoning TechSupport, they are telling me that the ATi Xpress 1100 graphics card uses integrated RAM (robbing it from the main system RAM) and uses 256Mb! This is on a machine that with a 19" monitor cost only £400!!!

Before I launch into anyone, (a) is PC World wrongly advertising this machine as having 1Gb RAM when a quarter of that figure can't be used and (b) does this graphics card REALLY rob me of 256Mb?

I have a Mac here with 1Gb RAM, which has integrated GMA950 graphics, but it still SHOWS a physical RAM install of 1Gb, regardless of how much RAM the image processing is taking up at any given time.

superscaper

Doesn't matter what the RAM is used for, if the pc comes with 1 GiB RAM installed then why not advertise it as that? I doubt they're lying to you (as much as I don't like pc world), many cheaper cards do use the system's RAM. Your mac isn't really the same as I believe integrated graphics in pcs also give the total RAM, it's only separate cards that share the RAM that don't. Although maybe they sohlud have made it clear the card didn't use it's own onboard memory.

As for your hard drive, it is a 74.5 GiB capacity, minus the 8 GiB for recovery and there you get the 66 GiB. I presume Vista plus other things take up 10 GiB on the disk to give you 56 GiB free.

dazzer21

Hmmmmm...

My main beef is that Vista is a total memory hog and I bought the machine on the understanding that 1Gb would be enough to run what I wanted without the OS being intrusive. I think that it's a bit off that they don't state that the graphics are integrated - all the ATi cards I've ever experienced (once again, this is based on my Mac experience) have been dedicated cards with separate memory.

superscaper

It's not that uncommon to get people on this board asking "where has my RAM gone" and it is nearly always due to memory sharing with the graphics card. You only really see it with the cheaper pcs usually from the likes of PC World. They should be specifying it though in the specs.

Since 1 GiB of RAM is what's recommended for Vista Premium then maybe it's not surprising you're not getting as expected since you've actually only got 768 MiB RAM available for the system. You should really have 1 GiB on top of memory for the graphics.

Mobeer

From ATI\AMD's website, the card is described as being a Hypermemory card, which means it uses some system memory. For example:
ATI X300 Hypermemory card = 32 MB onboard plus 96 MB system memory
ATI X600 Hypermemory card = 128 MB onboard plus 128 MB system memory

Looking at the PCWorld web site, I have sympathy for you though. For example one PC has the following:
Cache

---

512 MB
RAM memory

---

1024 MB
Graphics memory

---

up to 320 MB

which could suggested 1856 MB fitted, but which is actually:

Cache

---

512 kB
RAM memory

---

1024 MB minus the graphics memory used
Graphics memory

---

up to 320 MB