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    Vista Vs. Memory

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Andretti, Aug 5, 2007.

  1. Andretti

    Andretti Newbie

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    I just bought the new Toshiba A215-s4747 and it was advertised to have genuine windows VISTA home premium, AMD Turion 64X2 Dual -core mobile technology TL-56, 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM, 200GB HDD.
    I got home and the computer system says i have 824MB RAM and a 178GB HDD, I need to ran autocad and 3-D VIZ on this system since i need it for my Architectural practice.
    Any takes on this matter? What is the gauranteed, cheapest, and safest way/method to up-grade?
    I called Toshiba Tech. support and they re-directed me to the re-seller! :mad:
     
  2. odin243

    odin243 Notebook Prophet

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    You have 1024MB of RAM, however some of it is most likely taken up by an integrated graphics card, which is "stealing" some of your system RAM. This is normal. As for the hard drive, some of the capacity is lost in formatting the drive (think of it as square footage floor space lost in a house due to the walls), and it's possible that there's a backup partition, or something similar, as well.

    Also, I'm not sure what you're question is about upgrading. What parts of the laptop do you want to upgrade?
     
  3. Algus

    Algus Notebook Deity

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    Your notebook's RAM should be upgradeable. What exactly you need depends on what sticks came in the machine. If you have two slots and they're occuppied by two 512 MB sticks then you'd need to buy two 1 GB sticks for there to be an actual upgrade. If you have a slot free then you'd only need one extra gig.

    You should be able to change the amount of RAM your machine reserves for your video card in the BIOS (though depending on your IGP this may or may not have a noticable effect...I know I run my GeForce Go 6150 at 32 MB and rarely find I need to change it)

    Depending on how resource intensive (and how new) your 3D programs are, you may find that your notebook isn't powerful enough to run them...hopefully this isn't the case.
     
  4. Andretti

    Andretti Newbie

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    Thank you so much for your helpfull answer, I would like to up-grade the memory.
     
  5. AKAJohnDoe

    AKAJohnDoe Mime with Tourette's

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    Really, 2GB should be sufficient, any more than somewhere between 3 or 4GB will be wasted as per this.
     
  6. Andretti

    Andretti Newbie

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    Thanks, I need to up-grade it to 2 GB since i have a machine that has (2) 512MB sticks and is up-gradable to 4GB