I bought an emachine t3516a at Best Buy the day before they came out with vista. Very last pc in the store. Got it for $300. All the papers with it says it has 512 mb RAM and 256 mbs for video, but the pc only shows 380 for ram and 128 for video. Did I get had or is there a way to fix this? I moved the ram from slot to slot, thinking that it just wasn't snug or something. STILL say I only have 380 mbs.

It is shared video. There is no separate video card, so it uses RAM from the 512 for the video adapter. It is as it should be for a shared video system. it may have said "up to 256 RAM" and this would be true if you had 1 gig of RAM TOTAL. Read it again carefully. It may have been misrepresented if it implied there was a separate video car with 256 RAM on it (which would be unheard of for a $300 eMachine).

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2078642,00.aspYou could buy a dedicated graphics card to free up that memory.I've been looking on tigerdirect.com. I don't want anything that'll break the BANK, but something that'll do a fairly NICE job. All I play are game like caesar 4 and stuff like that. so I don't need a really high end card. Which nvidia card would you all recommend?Does it have to be an Nvidia card?
What's your budget?
And what graphics slot do you have?Is this your computer?

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If it is click on Specifications.I see 'PCI-Express® (PCI-E x16) slot available.
Are you still out there?The light is beginning to fade.No, it is off.Quote

No, it is off.