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)?
A free Costco membership.
S.
Perhaps a dunce cap for having shopped at and trusted Wal-Mart???
"Terry" wrote
LOL. I love hearing stories like this.
Tell the cheap bitch, to buy somewhere reputable.
Why would you expect a defective PC to be treated differently than any other defective product?
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.
Are you sure about your arithmetic there?
Steve
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.
A great many video cards borrow from main RAM. It is quite possible the system has 1 GB and the video adapter is using 256 MB of it. I doubt a Wal-Mart would even know this. Where is the system reporting the memory? Is it in the BIOS or in Windows? Look in the BIOS for the memory configuration. Most BIOSs will let you modify the RAM allotted to the video card. If you don't need it, lower the number to 128 or 64MB.
Acer is no better or worse than anything Dell or Gateway puts out at the price. Acer laptops are a pretty good value, a lot of features for a low price. Do buy the extended warranty, however. it is cheap but very good protection.
Paul
1024 - 256 = 768. 1 GB = 1024 megabytes.
Paul
not sure what you're trying to imply, but 1024 - 256 = 768, where's the error?
nate
Just needs to mind his K's and M's.
How do you figure that? All things considered, she's got a pretty decent machine for a great price. It also has a 16X PCIE slot, so, if she wants a good graphics card, she can pop one in and free up that stick of ram
They aren't padding the numbers at all. The system has 1 GB of RAM. Anyone buying a computer should do a little research and check on Google for a review, first. All it takes is a little legwork. But it is not false advertising at all. Dedicated video RAM is slower than DDR2 RAM as it uses the restricted PCI bus speed so using the systems DDR RAM is actually better if you are into graphics applications as it runs at the CPU's bus speed. It's also cheaper.
Paul
It undoubtedly comes with Vista Home. Minimum for that is 2 GB RAM. Vista alone uses up almost 900MB of system RAM without running any apps.
Paul
Whether the math is correct or not (confusing Kb with Mb), I'm glad somebody here understands that, depending on the hardware, Windows will sometimes report less RAM than is physically present. The computer was probably not defective. Don't let that ruin a good Walmart-bash though, I don't much like the place either.
Download and run the free CPU-Z utility from
Now I agree with that version.
Steve
I'd be willing to bet that most computers you'd find at Circuit City or Best Buy have the exact same issue (I am surprised at some higher-end spec computers that use integrated video cards). I think the better advice is having a clue what you're looking at (and not posting computer related questions in off-topic newsgroups -- if you'd posted it in a computer-related newsgroup to begin with the first or second answer would likely have been correct). They also would have told you that since computer memory is never sold in 256mb increments anymore, having a machine with 768mb is nearly impossible.
Bill
What??? Minimum for Vista Home Basic is 512mb. Now, maybe the minimum to run more than one or two apps at a time is more but surely not 2gb for Home Basic.
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