Video Memory will not increase!!

I have an Acer Aspire 5612 running with Vista Home Premium. My video memory is currently 32 mb and that's not good so I called ACER and they told me I can increase my Video memory in the BIOS. So I did, I changed my video memory in the BIOS to 128 mb (I had a choice between 64mb, 128mb and MaxDVMT), the BIOS showed this= Video Memory:[128mb]. I saved and exit but when I got into windows, vista told me i still had 32 mb of memory (so did my Age of Empires 3 (and it kept crashing because of insufficient memory)). I called acer again and they told me to wipe my windows and re-install it again... so i did and it still didn;t fix the problem! MY BIOS says 128mb and Vista says 32mb! Help!

 

How much system memory does your computer report? I am not sure if the 128MB that you set in the BIOS will show up in the video memory. The card may simply take a chunk out of your system memory.

 

what video card do you have?

 

Intel GMA I think.
Have you tried upgrading the drivers ?
Also, the Intel GMA will allocated as much memory as it needs.Try running a test (like 3DMark05) and check it against the other 128MB GMA's.

 

You can't set the amount of video memory the GMA950 shares so it's not the GMA950. Most likely he's using a Radeon X-series integrated GPU.

Something else to try is a driver update:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=64910

 

not all radeon x integrated can be set in the bios...

I think we just need to know what gfx it is. Can powerstrip manage video ram?

 

The Acer Aspire 5612WLMi has a Intel 945GM shared graphics.

 

I'm using the Intel GMA950 with 224 mb max shared memory. I'm going to send it to Acer repair center and let them deal with in like a week. In the mean time please try to help me.

 

Try updating your graphics drivers, get them from the Acer website and from Intel's latest and see if that helps?

 

I did, twice. And Acer said that my hardware is under warranty not my software so if I want it fixed... I need to pay 40 pounds inc. vat and i have to pay for postage.

 

The GMA950 will allocate memory if/when it needs more. To answer some of your other comments, while it is set in BIOS...that setting is the MAXIMUM that it is allowed to use. As long as you have Aero working, you're fine. My old GMA900 worked the same way, only most of the time I had (I think) 8 or 16MB allocated most of the time.

Try running something like 3Dmark03 and checking the memory while that is running. If it doesn't increase then you do have a problem.

Of course, this is assuming you have the GMA950. It would really help to know what type of card you have.