well my pc has 512mb ram ( its pathetic i know ) but when i check it says 480Mb any1 know how to get my RAM back ?
Your motherboard has a built in graphics card and it is sharing your system RAM. You would need to buy a dedicated graphics card with its own memory.
in short, your system has some peripheral which is dedicating system RAM to itself. 95-99% of the time it's onboard video.
yes, they do. but that doesn't change the usable amount of system RAM as defined by system properties.
To disable the integrated card(s) you will first need to replace them with dedicated things, then go in your BIOS and switch to AGP/PCI-E instead of Integrated.
all programs(operating systems included)reserve SOME RAM on initial load... however this RAM can later be released if needed later. but it doesn't DEDICATE it. if a very memory hungry application comes, windows will free that RAM and switch to page file. he's wondering why that's reading 480 instead of 512. his video acceleration(or some other peripheral) has DEDICATED that memory to itself, this memory CANNOT be released from the hardware unless the firmware setting is changed. the only software that I know of which actually dedicates RAM would be BIOS, and calling BIOS software is in itself a bit of a stretch as BIOS would probably be better categorized as firmware. Bios dedicates 2MB RAM to itself for very elementary, basic operations.(for those who are computer literate, BIOS is in itself a very basic operating system in PCs, the original idea was that the primary operating system and other programs could access BIOS for very direct hardware access and greater efficiency, in time it became evident that this wasn't entirely practical in the PC market as there was too much deviation between PCs so BIOS in a sense became a ghost of itself and is nto primarily used for hardware configurations.) though windows does not read it as taking up those 2MB because people would freak out for some reason.(Many other applications do when RAM is checked though, Valve's hardware survey being one of them)