RAM right or wrong?

[toto]

I've always understood that hard disc sizes get exaggerated by sellers
dividing by 1000 instead of 1024. I also understand about usable disc
space being less than quoted sizes due to sectorisation.

But I've never come across this before..

My new Dell laptop was sold as having 1024MB RAM. Both Vista and the
BIOS report the amount of RAM as 894MB. Dell CS have used both the
reasons in the first paragraph as reasons for the discrepancy. The other
suggested reason is that some of the RAM is shared with the video card -
but why as the Radeon Xpress 1150 has 256MB of its own?

Can someone explain please?

 

[donkey42]

I've always understood that hard disc sizes get exaggerated by sellers
dividing by 1000 instead of 1024. I also understand about usable disc
space being less than quoted sizes due to sectorisation.

the HDDs are sold as "unformatted", so formatting the HDD actually reduces the amount of usable space and more space is taken up by error checking stuff[OT]you usually loose about 11% of the total unformatted space (a 160Gb HDD looses about 10 - 11 Gb)[/ot]

My new Dell laptop was sold as having 1024MB RAM. Both Vista and the
BIOS report the amount of RAM as 894MB. Dell CS have used both the
reasons in the first paragraph as reasons for the discrepancy. The other
suggested reason is that some of the RAM is shared with the video card -
but why as the Radeon Xpress 1150 has 256MB of its own?

your motherboard has an onboard grfx, you need to disable it in the BIOS, (for your system to recognize the full amount of RAM) it's probably listed under Integrated Peripherals in the BIOS[ot]are you sure your not using the onboard grafx[/ot]

Edit:

Laptop

right your laptop has a Radeon 1150 built in grfx chipset (wrong word) and it is using 256Mb of your RAM as Video memory