1 gb of Ram?

[Markaholic]

Long story short..ive been running my machine w/ 768mb's of ram...well i upgraded a buddy of mine's computer for him last week and he had a leftover 256 stick which he gave to me.
So i stuck it into my PC...well now my BIOS reports the 256 add on right....but windows says its 1000mb...shouldnt this be 1024 mb ?
I am by far a computer noob..but this one has me puzzled...any ideas?
Also...i DO NOT have onboard video..so that cancels out where the other 24 mb's went!

 

[dgatwood]

Physical RAM is always powers of two. I'm not sure what the 1000 megs is unless maybe it's VM backing store size. I know Mac OS 9 and earlier used to allow you to set the amount of swap space available, but I can't imagine Windows doing that unless it's an old version or something. There's no reason for that sort of crap in a modern OS....

 

[Markaholic]

yeah its definitly got me puzzled since its an XP machine

 

[zappo]

is it a store bought pc? because some are setup to have memory reserved for the os which really never does anything and are you sure these rams are the same speeds brands and family? ram is supose to be matched you know

 

[mshilarious]

Physical RAM is always powers of two. I'm not sure what the 1000 megs is unless maybe it's VM backing store size. I know Mac OS 9 and earlier used to allow you to set the amount of swap space available, but I can't imagine Windows doing that unless it's an old version or something. There's no reason for that sort of crap in a modern OS....

You can mostly definitely manually set swap space in XP.

The memory problem is odd. It sounds like that HD marketing bit where they label the boxes in multiples of a billion and then you install and your PC shows it to you as 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes and you feel all ripped off

I didn't think memory did that though. Maybe one chip on the stick is bad? Try removing one of the old sticks, leaving in the new stick, and see what happens

 

[Nosferous]

Every PC I've ever installed or seen 1/2/3GB of RAM installed on reads at:
1GB or 1000MB
2GB or 2000MB
3GB or 3000MB

I believe it's just the way people haved decided to list it[the people that write the OS software...I'm sure my bios actually lists the whole size not the general size). It's like anything before a GB they are specific. And once you reach a gig that little few bits of MBs aren't important to list- though they are there. 'Cause now you're a big boy/girl with your 1GB/2GB/3GB/4GB...you're in the gigs now... a few megs mean squat.