It's sounds like your laptop is just like mine, though mine only has 32MB of
memory. Mine . On some PCs you get an option on how much you could share.
But that seems totally dependant on the Motherboard maker and the BIOS the
OEMS loaded. I had a PC with an onboard video and in the different BIOS
released that would take away and then re-add the option of how much to
share.
On a PC, the easy way to fix it, is to buy a video card and not use the
on-board card. On a laptop, if it doesn't have an option in teh BIOS. Don't
know how you can stop it.
Obviously, you can try and add more system RAM to your laptop if that is an
option. Though in your picture you show, 562 in use, that means technically
you still have about 400MB left to do whatever. The cached memory is stuff
loaded, but possible not in use. If you want to stop Vista from caching
anything, you can set the Superfetch service to Stop and either reboot or
stop the service manually.
You might look at buying a 2GB flash drive, and using the readyboost
technology to help out
Tturning off stuff like Aero will save you a little ram, though I didn't see
any change in ram usage on my laptop. it says I have 372MB of ram in use,
and I know 255MB of that is not going to video
Finally, it's my understanding that in the AGP-Shared system memory world,
the video card only uses that system memory, when it actually needs it. I
feel pretty confident that it's not carving out 255MB of ram for video on
boot. generally, if you're not playing a 3D game, then you're probably not
using very much, if any of the on-board ram. I'm sure there is a tool out
there that can tell how much video ram is in actual use, but for basic 2D
fuctions of the desktop, I'm sure that number would be within the 64MB
on-board ram you have(again, this would be running in classic mode).
Does you laptop offer you the option to upgrade the video card ram ?
