"Uncle Monster" wrote in message
...
catalpa wrote:
"Terry" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Sep 4, 9:21 pm, "HeyBub" wrote:
Terry wrote:
A friend of mine just bought a new computer at WalMart. The computer
is a complete set with speakers, mouse, keyboard and monitor. It was
advertised with 1G of memory and the system reports that it is 768K.
She contacted WalMart and Walmart acknowledges that it is a mistake.
Now she has to unplug everything, pack it up and take it back for a
swap.
This is a lot of work. What, if anything, extra should she expect for
her troubles from Walmart or Acer (brand)?
Walmart customer service is likely wrong. Depending on which system
function
is doing the reporting, she could very well have 1G of installed RAM
with
256K taken up by the on-board hardware video circuitry. In such case,
Windows reports only the memory available to it, which is !1Gig - 256K
=
768K.
She went to Acer's web site and it turns out that it is true that 256k
is being used for video.

They are just padding the numbers. It is a good thing she found this
information before she packed it up and took it back for nothing.

I guess not buying at Walmart is good advice.



Download and run the free CPU-Z utility from
http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php . It tells you exactly what processor, FSB,
motherboard and RAM (total, type and speed) you have. Then you can match
the advertised specs against what is actually in the computer.


A much better one is Belarc Advisor.

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

It tells you everything about your computer.

[8~{} Uncle Monster

Thanks for the link. Much more information, but it also has some minor
problems. It gives the wrong total for installed memory (it subtracts out
the video shared memory), but each slot is specified correctly. And it
doesn't bother to read the SPD to specify the rated speed of each RAM
module. Very useful for the list of Microsoft hotfixes.