[Paco Rabanne]

I upgraded a Dell E521 with a 2 GB DR-800 RAM (OCZ) and a 1 GB DDR2 Nvidia Video Card. Here is the deal.

The system automatically is getting 700 MB from the RAM, so the video card ends up with 1.7 GB and Vista (Home Premium) is running with 1.3 GB of RAM.

I tried to bypass this uptake thru the BIOS with no suscess. I also tried thru Video properties and no suscess also. Any wadvise with be appreciated.

[Digital_Jedi]

I really wouldn't worry about the RAM usage... I had the same thing going when I had Vista on my machine... If you have a program that need the RAM it will grab it... I tried playing with the video settings on my vith no success on how much is shared. If you want to free up some ram... you can try and tweek setting... turning off aero... ect..

[Paco Rabanne]

Originally Posted by Digital_Jedi

I really wouldn't worry about the RAM usage... I had the same thing going when I had Vista on my machine... If you have a program that need the RAM it will grab it... I tried playing with the video settings on my vith no success on how much is shared. If you want to free up some ram... you can try and tweek setting... turning off aero... ect..

Thanks, DJ. Originally, the sysmtem was deadly slow. I change the BIOS settings for the performace of the SATA drive and open the memory from 64 to 128 MB (integrated video). I turned of the aero effect and the PC improve ~15% speed.

I decided to upgrade video and ram, and still the improvement in speed is not worth the money. I am not really sure if getting more RAM will improve the speed.

I may try to reinstall the OS using a smaller partition to see if this improves the speed.

[Digital_Jedi]

Yes the aero does use a good chunk of the system resources... adding more ram will help a bit but not by much... also if you are running a 32bit OS then you are limmited to how much RAM you can use... about 3.5 to 4 GB. You also dont need to spend alot of money on RAM... but you dont want to buy cheap either. Re-installing may help but... go to blackviper.com com... it shows you how to config services vista has running that you may never use... (like tablit PC stuff) it help improve a system a bit depending on the degree of what you tweak... care cause you can also damage the system as well and have to reinstall your OS... the other way to go is up or down... windows 7 uses system resources a lot better than vista... or you could drop down to XP and have a good macihine... also look at your process speed... lots of RAM doesn't mean a thing if you have a slow CPU.