Netbook Question

[liquid]

This may sound like a very stupid question.... but I bought a little netbook for school, and it was advertised with 1.2ghz and 1GB of RAM. Ive been playing with it all day and have thought about upgrading it to windows 7 to hopefully speed things up. I ran a quick diagnostic on it, and it only has 768MB of ram

Am I missing something here.....?

[longsock]

Re: Netbook Question

nope that sounds about right, some of the ram is shared out as video memory so you'll never see 1 gb

[cam_wmh]

Re: Netbook Question

I bought one recently too.

Windows 7 Starter, is pretty bare.. so you should be ok.

[liquid]

Re: Netbook Question

But it even shows 768MB when I look under system properties in the control panel. I assumed there it would show me the full amount of RAM.

It's just frustrating because when I try to watch episodes of TopGear (MPEG download), I can't run it with full-screen or it becomes very choppy.

Will switching from basic XP to 32bit Windows 7 help somewhat?

[stefan]

Re: Netbook Question

don't know if a netbook boots like a PC, but if it does the ram check deal at start, you would see 1gb, but after windows fires up and the video card allocates what it needs, windows will just report what is left. Its normal. You can probably set the vid card to take less, but not sure that would help anything.

Also may be worth trying a different video program. Some are more efficient that others.

[cam_wmh]

Re: Netbook Question

don't know if a netbook boots like a PC, but if it does the ram check deal at start, you would see 1gb, but after windows fires up and the video card allocates what it needs, windows will just report what is left. Its normal. You can probably set the vid card to take less, but not sure that would help anything.

Also may be worth trying a different video program. Some are more efficient that others.

What do you use? I use VLC

[stefan]

Re: Netbook Question

I used Divx player a lot, but now I mostly use VLC at work and Mplayer at home (linux at home)

[liquid]

Re: Netbook Question

thanks for the info guys - I actually switched to media player classic, and the videos play fine. Now I have something to keep me occupied while waiting for my flight

[stefan]

Re: Netbook Question

sweet. yeah, there are a few media players that have so much bulk and unnecessary extras that tie up resources.

[Kor]

Re: Netbook Question

If anyone is thinking about a netbook I highly recommend getting one with the Atom N330 cpu and Nvidia ION. Pretty awesome performance.

[bart]

Re: Netbook Question

usually in bios you can allocate any amount of mem to your video if its shared try that