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

[Jim Kinney]

Courtney,

If you "increase video ram" it will come from system ram. That will make the
swap activity even worse. I doubt that the video ram can be upgraded as they
are usually both soldered to the board and the video chip can only address X
amount anyway.

Hm. That is a lot of video ram for an old P3. It is probably really not
dedicated video ram. If you look at the output of free -m you will see the
total ram available to the OS. I suspect it will be 16MB less than 512MB.

2008/11/19 Courtney Thomas <courtneycthomas at bellsouth.net>

>  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 <rbrtwicks at aim.com>
> *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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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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