[ale] OT: Cheap Laptop w/o shared RAM

[Courtney Thomas]

I have a Dell Latitude C810 wtih the maximum RAM installed, which I believe is 512MB, Pentium III 133 mhz, 16 MB video RAM, 20 Gig HD w/5 Gig free.

Does this mean it does not have shared video ram and will increasing video ram from 16 to 32 MB significantly speed up this machine ?

 It seems to be incessantly paging stuff back and forth to the HD. Are there settings that will optimize this too ? Will doubling the video RAM significantly improve this activity, as well ?

Thanks for your help,

Courtney
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Robert A. Wicks 
  To: ale at ale.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 1:29 PM
  Subject: Re: [ale] OT: Cheap Laptop w/o shared RAM


  I don't think this is right. I have a $500 Acer laptop which came with Vista Home. It can get up to 358MB of RAM from the system, but the onboard is nowhere near that much. I have an Nvidia 7300 with 128M onboard, but it can get twice that from the system. I don't think shared RAM is the problem, unless the video card has *no* onboard RAM. If it has *some*, you won't have the slow 2D performance. You will get a slowdown with intensive 3D stuff, though.

  Jim Lynch wrote: 
Jim Popovitch wrote:
  What are the advantages of having dedicated video ram?  What are the
downsides to not having dedicated video ram?

Thx.

-Jim P.
  
    One think I keep reading that is a real positive, is that Vista won't 
run on a shared video ram.  ;)

Jim.
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