Hi all,
I was given an old Acer Travelmate 2000 laptop a few weeks ago. The laptop was in such great condition that I decided [as a project] to do it up a little bit and maybe use it for a bit of retro emulation. However I'm not that familiar with old laptops and I've run into a few problems.
The laptop has a "ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP" graphics chip/card (I'm not sure what it is ???) and it also had a measly 256MB of RAM. There was also Windows XP pre-installed from the previous owners.
Now originally I thought the laptop had 32mb of graphics but I found a setting in the BIOS that allowed me to change this from anywhere between 32mb to 128mb.
A few weeks passed and I decided to remove Windows XP and mess around with some light-weight Linux operating systems, so I partitioned the HD and installed the new O/S. I decided to ditch the 256MB of RAM so I purchased 2x 1GB sticks off eBay and upgraded the RAM to a total of 2GB. It was at this point that I noticed within the BIOS that the option for me to select the graphic memory had completely disappeared! - I thought that this might have been to do with the fact that I removed Windows XP.
I decided that I didn't like Linux and after upgrading the RAM and a larger HD, I opted to install Windows XP SP3. So I did that, hoping that the option in the BIOS would return for me to select my graphics memory - it didn't. However after I installed the graphics driver in Windows, I checked the adapter memory and it said 128mb, so it didn't really bother me, as long as I was getting that full 128mb of max graphics, I didn't care about the option disappearing from the BIOS.
I continued to install the rest of the Travelmate 2000 drivers and I upgraded the BIOS to Phoenix 1.16 (which is the latest for the laptop). All seemed well... Then I done a final restart of the system to confirm all the drivers were successfully installed... Aaaaand this is the problem... I went to check the graphics adapter and the 128mb that it showed literally 5 minutes ago had dropped to 64mb. - Why did this happen?
How can I fix this? I want to push this laptop as much as I can for graphics and I thought upgrading the RAM would allow for this. How can I get the full 128mb of shared graphics memory back? How can I get that option to re-appear in my BIOS again?
I was given an old Acer Travelmate 2000 laptop a few weeks ago. The laptop was in such great condition that I decided [as a project] to do it up a little bit and maybe use it for a bit of retro emulation. However I'm not that familiar with old laptops and I've run into a few problems.
The laptop has a "ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP" graphics chip/card (I'm not sure what it is ???) and it also had a measly 256MB of RAM. There was also Windows XP pre-installed from the previous owners.
Now originally I thought the laptop had 32mb of graphics but I found a setting in the BIOS that allowed me to change this from anywhere between 32mb to 128mb.
A few weeks passed and I decided to remove Windows XP and mess around with some light-weight Linux operating systems, so I partitioned the HD and installed the new O/S. I decided to ditch the 256MB of RAM so I purchased 2x 1GB sticks off eBay and upgraded the RAM to a total of 2GB. It was at this point that I noticed within the BIOS that the option for me to select the graphic memory had completely disappeared! - I thought that this might have been to do with the fact that I removed Windows XP.
I decided that I didn't like Linux and after upgrading the RAM and a larger HD, I opted to install Windows XP SP3. So I did that, hoping that the option in the BIOS would return for me to select my graphics memory - it didn't. However after I installed the graphics driver in Windows, I checked the adapter memory and it said 128mb, so it didn't really bother me, as long as I was getting that full 128mb of max graphics, I didn't care about the option disappearing from the BIOS.
I continued to install the rest of the Travelmate 2000 drivers and I upgraded the BIOS to Phoenix 1.16 (which is the latest for the laptop). All seemed well... Then I done a final restart of the system to confirm all the drivers were successfully installed... Aaaaand this is the problem... I went to check the graphics adapter and the 128mb that it showed literally 5 minutes ago had dropped to 64mb. - Why did this happen?
How can I fix this? I want to push this laptop as much as I can for graphics and I thought upgrading the RAM would allow for this. How can I get the full 128mb of shared graphics memory back? How can I get that option to re-appear in my BIOS again?
