Totally confused with Ram & Vista .. help !

[Soupy]

OK ... my father-in-law bought himself a PackardBell PC with Vista Basic, he only does some word processing, e-mail, surfing etc etc ... but it only came with 512 of DDR2-533 (PQi Brand) which works but Vista reports it as 448meg or something, that's fine cause the video card is taking some , I understand that but I wanted to give him a boost so got him another stick of 512 DDR2-533 Crucial.

Now, when I put in the extra memory the PC runs fine but Vista still only reports the 448meg but Everest shows and reads both sticks as being there, tried the sticks individually too and both work fine ... ?

The M/B only has 2 ram slots so I'm limited there for choice but is there something in Vista that I need to do ? .... this is my first look at Vista.

I'm confused ... the only thing that I can that differs between the 2 sticks is one says (1rank, 4banks) and the other (1rank, 8banks) ... any help at all chaps will be greatly appreciated

.

 

[WJA96]

Where are you looking for the RAM info in Vista?

What is the limit for the on-board graphics in terms of RAM? Could it be taking 512Mb?

 

[Soupy]

I was just using the My Computer / Properties info.

Here's the PC spec from the PB site.

CPU Support
Support Intel® Pentium® Hyper - Threading technology with FMB Performance 2005 support.
Support for an Intel® Pentium® 4 processor in a LGA775 socket with a 800 MHz system bus, 2.8Ghz to 3.8 GHz or higher.
Support for an Intel® Celeron® processor in a LGA775 socket with a 533 MHz system bus, 2.8 GHz or higher.

Chipset
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 Northbridge.
ATI SB600 Southbridge.

System Memory
2 banks.
DDR2 400 / DDR2 533 / DDR2 667 DIMMs.
Supports up to 2 GB system memory.

Video
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 GPU.
Maximum shared video memory is 256 MB (depends on the amount of system memory).
Total maximum video memory 512 MB using HyperMemory.

Does that explain anything ?

.