Why do I only have 66MB of Memory when in dxdiag it says I have 285MB?

I'm really new to these things and I received this laptop as a gift.
I have a HP Pavilion dv2415nr
it has:
1 GB Ram
AMD Turioin 64x2
Nvidia GeForce Go 6150

I checked at System Requirements lab and it says my video card has 66MB of memory

When I check in dxdiag it says 285 MB of memory.
What is going on? Is there a way to make it 285MB instead of 66MB?

 

That video chipset does not have dedicated video memory. It actually shares your system ram as video memory. So in short, it will show up as a few different sizes. There is the minimum that it uses and there is a maximum amount that it can use.

So a program may only recognize a small amount of memory but windows shares a larger amount with regular ram to improve the video performance.

I hope that helps.

 

Thanks, that helps a lot!
So I take it that my Windows automatically shares ram with the graphics card when I start playing games?

Also I play Guild Wars and it seem to stutter, does anyone know how to prevent that? Since my sister also has the same Graphics card, 1 GB Ram, and the same processor (her desktop is about a year older then my laptop) but her's does not stutter.

 

Updating your drivers should help with the stuttering.

 

I believe the equivalent Athlon 64 X2 is faster than the notebook Turion. Drivers will help alot, however.

Also, if you are running Vista and she is running XP or older, that could accound for some of the difference. You should considera second gig of RAM if that is the case.

 

Ok, I will update my drivers and see if that works. If it doesn't I guess I will buy an extra gig of RAM, although I don't know how to install it myself so I'll have to look for a place that can do it for me.

Thanks!!

 

uhhh, I was updating everything and now I don't have sound? I updated the Sound Driver at HP.com and now when I try to watch movies it plays but with no sound, when I try to listen to my music I see the progress bar move but no sound, and on Windows media player it says it cannot play this file?

I can watch stuff from youtube but when I try to watch movies, listen to music, or play games there isn't any sound.

Anything like this happen to anyone?

 

I have heard of this problem multiple times with HP drivers. The only thing I heard someone did was took it back to the store of purchase, and had them fix it.