Using onboard graphics, the system will allocate a bit of main memory for the graphics chip. It is normal for it to not show up as system ram. If you install a discrete graphics card and disable onboard graphics, the memory will no longer be partitioned and all of it will show up as system ram.asylumni

Ah, that makes sense now, thanks.

Learned something new I guess.

I just built my first PC; Everything seems to be in working order except for my RAM (My RAM), which works fine and all; It's just that when I run DxDiag, it will show up as only 1792mb ("Can I run it" website also shows only 1.7gb), whereas the bios will show it as it's proper 2gb. So I was wondering if this is actually an issue at all if my bios says it's ok but DxDiag says it isn't. Also, is there any way to fix this?

MotherBoard (Using onboard graphics)

CPU

PSU

Pic to show you what I'm talking about.

Don't wanna take that route just yet. The most Ironic thing about this is, about 3 hours before I encountered this problem I was building a system to back up it's HDD.

I tried mounting via ubuntu, I got an error "cannot mount volume"

Edit: this is the entire message under details.

failed to mount '/dev/sda1': input/output error ntfs is either inconsistent, or you have hardware faults, or you have a softRAID/fakeRAID hardware. in the first case run chkdsk /f on windows then reboot into windows TWICE, the usage of the /f parameter is very important! if you have softRAID/FakeRAID then first you must activate it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory. (e.g. /dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). please see the 'dmraid' documentation for details.

Well, that's a mouthfull... Also, I have no Idea what it means. I don't know the first thing about RAID, and as far as I know I do not have softraid/fakeraid, considering I've never heard of it before...

Bump+ some relevent information.

Earlier today I tried installing ubuntu on the system for dual booting but I encountered an error with the hdd partition portion, it didn't go into details, but I eventually gave up on it.

Also, when trying to boot up the system, the HDD light blinks normally, so does the dvd drive, it's just unable to boot for some reason. When trying to use my xp disk, It says something like "Setup is inspecing your system hardware" then goes to black.

I wouldn't find the inability to boot windows so wierd, it's just the fact that I can't seem to boot a cd that is troubling me. It's just the xp disks it won't boot by the way (I have 2 I've tried), I put in my brother's Emachine system recovery disk which booted up fine until a point where it realized it wasn't an emachine system and aborted.

It just doesn't make sense.... *head explodes"

Edit: My ubuntu installer disk boots up fine on the laptop, and the two xp disks I'm trying to use boot up fine on a different computer, I doubt it has anything to do with my hardware configuration, considering I can boot everything but xp disks.

(have I said "boot" enough times in this thread?)

I know this isn't exactly hardware related, but it seemed like the most appropiate forum considing the two options.

Anyways, I noticed my Acer aspire 5315 (xp sp2) crawling while doing pretty much anything, so I reboot the system, only to have it not boot windows, it will boot up to the start up screen saying "ACER press f2 for bios" etc. but after that, when it usually boots windows,the screen just goes black, like i'm about to see the windows booting animation, but nothing comes up, just a black screen with no text or anything. I try to put in my windows xp cd, it says "press any button to read from disk" so I do, but it just goes to black, and I see nothing.

Also, when I had rebooted the system earlier, There was a bubble in the bottom right corner saying something along the lines of "a windows system file is currupt" the files was "cursor" something, the bubble went away just as I was reading it.

Anyone know whats going on? I'm assuming I managed to get a virus (and If I did, I wasted money on AVG pro, because that was running constantly).

The HDD is Hitachi hts5416805(or's')9sa00

So I'm trying to build a pc from old machines I had lying around, just for backing up purposes. Anyway, I came across this GPU that was in a compaq deskpro, it has this connecter on it that kinda looks like an IDE connecter, infact, an ide plug fits perfectly over it. Anyways, here's a pic, if anyone could enlighten me that would be great. someone suggested they were just jumper pins while a few others say that it was used to connect to an old ati-tv wonder card.

(pic taken from ebay auction)

you can see a few pins missing in an "L" shape.

Also, the card doesn't seem to be functioning at all, when I booted it up the first time the mobo beeped once shortly then2 long beeps, which I read is a GPU error, I took the card out for a few minuets, put it back in, and the beeping stopped, not sure why. I wonder if these pins have anything to do with it not functioning.

The card is a 3d rage pro turbo made in 98.

You're so right it's not even funny. No seriously, this isn't funny.

Anyways, it looks like my brother is getting a pretty much brand new computer now, the card is already on it's way and the thing had to be upgraded eventually.