[Wftl-lug] Stupid laptop question

[Marcelino Mata]

I hope you realize your asking a Windows question on a Linux mailing
list..against my better judgement, I will give some suggestions on the
problem....are you sure your running XP not Vista?...most new laptops come
with Vista now...Vista can consume close to 400Mb on boot-up...that could
easily explain your numbers....and I have read that Vista can stall during
during movie playback on some computers....

If you are really running WinXP, a fresh WinXP install will consume 90Mb RAM
on boot-up....as HP probably loaded it with trialware/3rd party software,
that number is probably higher.  I doubt that HP loaded that much
trialware/3rd party stuff but I have never bought a HP consumer
computer....

What I would really like to suggest is download a liveCD like Ubuntu Desktop
and check ram by typing "free" from the terminal.

The results will be something like this:

                 total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        516052     132308     383744          0      10336      61268
-/+ buffers/cache:      60704     455348
Swap:       787176          0     787176

This Laptop running Ubuntu 6.10 +E17 with 512Mb RAM is using 71Mb.
I got this number by substacting "used" from cached.
This is fresh boot-up with nothing running.

With LiveCD, your numbers will be higher since everything will run in RAM.

Marcelino



On 3/4/07, Jon Biddell < jon at mandrake.net.au> wrote:
>
> The BIOS number seems incredibly high... As this is stored in ROM it
> shouldn't be taking up any memory.. If you can go into the BIOS setup, turn
> off BIOS caching and see if that makes any difference.
>
> Hi there!  Been doing much more lurking and reading than posting, but I've
> got a question.  Husband and I just purchased an HP DV5116NR notebook.  To
> make a very long story short--it comes equipped (supposedly) with 512 MB RAM
> (it also came equipped with XP, but, trust me, *that's* going to change!).
> We were using it after his recent surgery for him to play movies on.  Movies
> keep stopping--not all of them, but "busy" ones like LOTR and such just keep
> slowing up and stuttering.  My first thought was "too little RAM" so I
> checked the RAM and here's what I find:
>
> My Computer General tab - 384 MB
> BIOS - 384 MB
> Running MSinfo32 - 512 MB, but only 96.11 MB available!!!!
>
> Okay, the 384's I can understand; the video card uses 128 MB of shared
> memory, but this thing's telling me that the system, while absolutely
> *nothing* is running (except the bloated-warthog-MS-background programs) has
> only 96.11 MB of RAM available??!?  I contacted HP via email and their
> "helpful" tech support is attempting to convince me that that's a perfectly
> normal number.  This is the first laptop/notebook computer I've had and
> those numbers just don't seem right to me.  Can somebody tell me if that's
> "normal" or not so that when I call tomorrow a.m., I'll know what I'm
> talking about when I blow someone's ears off?
>
> Thank you.  As soon as I can verify whether or not this thing needs some
> service, the happy "Format C:Get This Crappy OS Off My Computer" will be
> occuring.
>
> Bryn
>
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