Is there a way to manually increase the video memory on your computer?

I have vista and I can get a different video card that isn't that expensive but is there a way to manually increase the amount of video memory



I have an HP pavillion dv 2000 notebook, windows vista and an Nvidia GeForce 7 series|||Unfortunately, no. The video memory is either taken directly from the hardware (for stand-alone cards) or borrowed from system memory (for integrated cards with shared memory).



With stand-alone cards, the memory is a function of the how much RAM is physically soldered right onto the add-on card. If the manufacturer put 1GB of DDR3 memory on your graphics card, that is all you can have. The only way you could actually increase the amount of video memory on that card would be to purchase the specific memory chips designed for that card and physically solder them right on to the graphics card... IF there was available space. There is no way to "transfer" system memory (the only other memory in your system) for use by the stand-alone graphics card.



With integrated cards (such as those found built into motherboards and laptops) there is NO memory specific to those cards. Integrated cards use what is known as shared memory... in other words, they borrow memory directly from your main system RAM. So if you have a computer with 4GB of RAM and a video card that uses 512MB for itself, that video card will "borrow" the 512MB from your system, leaving you with only 3.5GB for all your other programs. Most of those integrated chipsets will only borrow what they happen to need at any given time and will borrow more or less depending on the needs of the card. But they will still have a maximum as set by the manufacturer that you can not change.



So... long story short... you can not manually increase the amount of video memory in any computer without replacing the existing graphics card for one with more memory.



Hope that helps!|||Generally, no. And even if you theoretically could just increase the video memory, that would mean that you're using a crappy integrated graphics card anyway and you wouldn't see any performance difference because the GPU would be the limiting factor, not the video memory.|||yes there is....delete other stuff|||crack it open and install more RAM, and get an external hard drive... or go to a computer store and ask them to put more memory and RAM in