Acer lying about specs?

Im a noob to laptops, and i just bought my first one the other day. I got an Acer Aspire 5100 with amd turion 64 mk-36 processor. I bought it because of its $600 price and specs, it was advertised to have a 120 gb hard drive and 1 gb ddr2 ram
But when i use it and check the specs its more like 105gb split between 2 hard drives and 786 mb ram, is this correct? or did i get a bad one and should return it?

 

Your laptop is just fine,

The reason you are not seeing the full amount of space is you are not seeing the hidden partition that holds the D2D recovery tool. This holds data and is a hidden drive outside of windows (you can see it in dos or any other partition utility out side of an operating system, so this is where the extra space is going. Secondly about the missing space, there is not "120 GB" simply because of the old 1024mb = 1gig vs. 1000mb = 1gig dispute that has been going on for some time now with hard drive manufacturers. A 120gb drive completely formatted will give you roughly 111GB of data.

As far as the memory goes this can be attributed to your integrated graphics, in which windows sets aside a designated amount of internal memory for graphics processing. This am amount can be seen and edited in your bios (f2 on startup) but in reality you most likely have the listed memory (I know of no oem manufacturer that ships 786mb of memory).

1024MB of memory
786MB of memory free
----------------------
Roughly 256mb of memory for graphics processing (not counting the page file and floating points)

--ssx--

 

first of all welcome to the forums

well simple answer no its not deffective

the hard drive i acctually a 120gb but split between two paritions the c and the d mostly the d maybe a recovery partition from which you should create 2 dvds so that if anything should go wrong it can restore yor lappy to original settings or original factory settings
wheres as the RAM is shared with your onbord graphic memory which i presume is GMA (graphic media accelerator) mostly it is GMA 950 and sares your RAM thus decreasing you ram

 

Use the CPU-Z utility,
And check your ram using that utility, there you can find the exact amount of ram there.
Please note : There are different revisions (configurations) of this laptop, e.g. :
Acer Aspire 5100-3357
Acer Aspire 5100-3583
Acer Aspire 5100-3959
Are you sure you bought the same configuration that was advertised ?

 

@ shahee...
The VGA would be the Nvidia 6100/6150. The GMA 950's for the intel 945 chipset.

 

thanks seeshomaru my bad i had assumed it was an intel even though he had mentioned it was a turion my bad ,.....sorry and thaks for correcting me sesshomaru
cheers and thanks again

-shaheen

 

Since it is a 5100 and for that price it must be the Radeon 1100 express based on the 200. So it is a UMA system which means the graphics has shared memory with the processor. The graphics takes 256MB from the main memory. You can change that in the bios.

 

hey everybody. Thank you all very much for your input, i really appreciate the valuable information about you have given me about my laptop and giving me a better understanding of computers, im very thankful.

All my questions were answered , but if your curious
Aspire 5100-3357
AMD turion 64 ( 2.0Ghz, 512 l2 cache
Ati radeon xpress 1100 hyper memory
120 gb hdd
1 gb ddr2

 

I thought my 9300 would come with bluetooth, but no. I thought it would come with a GeForce 6100, it came with a 7300.... I thought I could grab DVD's, it came with a TSSTcorp "DVD writer"....
But for your hd, it's normal as explained above, and for memory, something with gc shared memory perhaps (I probably say something nonsense...)? I noticed some merchand sites copied their description on constructor's site, as for mine, like "The 9300 will have maximum connectivity, Ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth, ....", But it can be a simple description of capabilities of the 9300's, although specs are different from a 9301 to a 9303 for example. I think if you keep a trace of the page you buy a notebook or other stuff, you certainly can obtain things like an extra gratis kinky bluetooth module if the website didn't describe correctly your item. Now I will take care of that.

 

Acer isn't lying about the specs with the memory. It shows up as 786 because the other portion of it is dedicated to video. It is suppose to be a 512mb video with 256 dedicated. As far as the hard drive space is concerned are you sure it's really 2 hard drives and not 2 partitions. Each partition will look like a drive in windows.