Increae graphics memory on Acer Travelmate 350 series

Hi,

I've got a 350 series travelmate (351TEV I think) which is limited in the BIOS to only allocating a max of 8MB to the onboard VGA card. Is there a way to increase this with a BIOS update?

As the 350 is very similar to the 360 series, is there any chance of using the BIOS upgrade for the 360 on the 350 or is that a quick way to turning the laptop into a door wedge ??

I know I could try an PCMCIA graphics card, but as I'm trying to put linux on this, I'm not sure it would work or be supported..

Thanks for any help!

 

PCMCIA graphics card? You have me curious with that. As for the original question, what graphics chip are you using? and what exactly is your present config holding you back from?

 

I think it's the standard onboard Trident chip with the option to use 4/8 MB of system ram for the graphics card. Maybe it's a hardware limitation on the chip, or more likely a soft limit given the device shipped with only 64 MB ram as manufactured, however as this now has 512 MB, only giving 8 to the graphics seems a little miserly.

I'm planning to use this spare laptop to run a recent linux variant (Fedora core 7) and think that it would play nicer with more than 8MB of graphics memory.

Regarding the PCMCIA graphics card, yes it is possible and we have one at work, its a Village Tronic VT Book with a Trident XP2 32 MB chip.