Legit Reviews

Hi guys,

I bought a laptop with 4gb of ram, with Windows Vista Home Premium x86. Its also got a 512mb graphics card.
This configuration was not changable. So heres my list of problems and questions:

Im only getting 3GB of ram allocated.
Of course i know 32 bit systems can only allocate 4gb and use a bit for themselves, taking it down by roughly 800mb.
Apparently the graphics card has 512mb dedicated and turbocache can bring it up to 1700mb+. Has turbocache ANYTHING to do with my unnallocated ram?
is turbocache doing something i dont know about? like caching the extra memory in the hardware that windows cant?

I cant understand why Toshiba would sell a laptop with 4gb ram and a 512mb graphics card with a 32bit os. Is there something im missing??

The only drivers for the laptop are vista 32 and 64 bit drivers.
I have a beautiful custom version of Windows XP 32bit edition. Specially for gaming. Is there any chance of getting the vista drivers to work with xp?
And is there an easy way of turning an iso of 32bit windows into 64bit windows? i presume changing the bare essentials like the kernal should keep the customisations but im not sure how to go about swapping from a 64bit iso just yet. Im still doing my research.

My ram is 4gb DDR3 1066mhz, which is faster than my GDDR3 800mhz ram in my graphics card, would turbocache thus improve performance by allowing games to use the 1066mhz?

With such fast ram, how is readyboost suppose to improve upon startup times? Is that not a lot faster than flash drives?

Any help would be appreciated thanks.

The amount of RAM your system can see has a lot of factors in play, and sad to say unless you go to 64bit, you won't see any more of it.

And if you want to go 64bit, go with the vista route, 64bit xp wasn't very well implemented. And hacking a 32bit xp installer into a 64bit install will have even more problems.

As turbocache can dynamically adjust the amount of system RAM it uses, I don't think it is hiding RAM from the system to use purely for the videocard.

Readyboost won't do anything for you, and is intended for systems with less than 1GB of RAM. It's intended to act as a temporary hard drive rather than system RAM, but in lots of cases the hard drives are faster than the memory sticks that are 'readyboost certified' so it's completely pointless.

Dan

Thanks.

I tried going the xp64 route, had to slipstream intel raid drivers onto the disk to get past a really annoying 0x0000007B error.
I Eventually got it working (had to remove extra hdd to prevent it installing the boot loader onto it) and ive found most drivers.
New Toshiba laptops dont officially support XP and you cant get drivers off their site.

Had to use an acer driver for the 9700M GTS.
A few drivers that were vista 64 bit worked if you used Windows SDK Orca database editor to bypass the OS version check.
Im still hunting for the Featherlite buttons (of which only the play, stop, back and forward buttons work).
The irda (which doubles as a ir remote reciever) doesnt work yet.
The fingerprint scanner (which i dont really care about) doesnt work.

Apart from that ive found a substitute driver for pretty much everything.
If anyone knows where i could get some more thatd be cool, and dont be afraid to ask about the working drivers either.