Day 324 - Rob Peter

geekery

I've been dealing with a really frustrating PC problem this evening...this is going to be a technical rant I expect...if you know what's good for you, you might want to step away from your screen right now.

I've been upgrading a PC for my friend (and more importantly, my #1 Blog Commenter) Andy.

I put a new hard disk drive in the PC, and Andy had bought an additional 2GB of RAM, to boost the memory to 4GB. 

I suggested adding a discrete graphics card if we could find one knocking about...it would enable the use of multiple monitors, and it's getting easier to find flat-screens that are going begging...it may also help with an annoying RAM issue that Andy had reported with the new memory sticks. 

Of course, I couldn't find a graphics card or a spare monitor, so Andy suggested buying a card, at least. 

After a quick bit of research to ensure compatibility, I found a half decent graphics card for the princely sum of £21, and duly ordered it.

Said graphics card can be seen in the overly large box above.

I set about installing it, first opening up the PC...

open chassis surgery

I have to insert the graphics card somewhere in the middle of this lot...

implant

Ok, there it is...sweet, now put the PC back together...

job...done?

So far so good, and it's only taken 5 minutes...I install the drivers and everything seems to be hunky-dory.

Then I remembered that pesky memory issue - Andy had mentioned that the PC only seemed to be able to see 3.25GB of the 4.00GB available...I'd had a look and there are many opinions on what this is about, but very little in the way of actual resolutions to the problem.

However, it seemed likely that this memory was being used by the graphics chip on the motherboard...so my plan was to install a graphics card with its own 1GB of RAM on board, thus freeing up the system RAM set aside for it.

So I figured I'd better check, seeing as I'd changed the hardware now, and see whether it had freed up the extra memory as anticipated.

Now there's only 2.75GB usable, out of 4.00GB available...dagnabbit!!

After much more research, and much taking the PC to bits and putting it back together again (all to no avail), it seems that there is a crazy and ridiculously frustrating quirk to this particular combination of motherboard chipset, BIOS, and Operating System...

When using a dedicated graphics card with 1GB of RAM, the motherboard sets aside 1GB of system RAM...so you can only use your additional 1GB of graphics RAM by giving up 1GB of your system RAM...arguably a worse position than where you started.

Argh!!

Anyway, whilst I ponder a way forward for this frustrating issue, here's a little bonus photo for anyone who's made it this far...

arm in arm

Just me and The Boy Wonder chilling by the fire, late the other evening...

At least I've got my trousers on...

:-)