Ram question

If a laptop has 16gb of onboard ram but only shows 7.20 gb available. Why would that be? It's not my laptop - it was one I was considering buying but one of the screenshots about the laptop details shows this. It has integrated graphics. Is it possible that half the integrated ram could stop working?

Edit. It has Intel Iris Plus G7 graphics if that helps. Could the system be allocating half the ram to the graphics?

The word integrated suggests to me that the device is soldered onto the motherboard and it's possible to also have a socket to add in a module so Yes, the added 8GB could have a problem.

Most Notebooks have a way to enter the BIOS Setup, could be F2 or Esc key immediately upon turning it on. Different brands use a different method, my HP uses Esc and my Dells use F2. Once in the BIOS check for how much memory is available. The BIOS is Basic Input Output System and the Operating System reads so as to know what resources are available when it starts loading.

None of my Notebooks have integrated memory but my only HP [cheap-o] has an eMMC storage drive soldered on the motherboard and not easily changeable, if at all.

Thanks. I can't do that as don't physically have the laptop, so I think I'll give it a miss. I did read somewhere that that particular integrated graphics card might have half the onboard ram dedicated to it though. Which isn't great.

This is the dxdiag report on my Dell Vostro 14" Notebook with 12GB RAM:

Hazel123 said:

If a laptop has 16gb of onboard ram but only shows 7.20 gb available. Why would that be? It's not my laptop - it was one I was considering buying but one of the screenshots about the laptop details shows this. It has integrated graphics. Is it possible that half the integrated ram could stop working?

Edit. It has Intel Iris Plus G7 graphics if that helps. Could the system be allocating half the ram to the graphics?

Click to expand...

I checked. In Task Manager, my cheap Lenovo laptop with Intel HD 520 integrated graphics claims half of its RAM is shared by the iGPU. However, t also shows more than half the RAM as available. (?)

With Intel integrated graphics the VRAM is dynamically allocated from main RAM so that it varies depending on requirements at the time.

You can display that in the Task Manager. e.g. my Laptop now is running with Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, at this moment 700-800 MB is being allocated/shared.
Whilst this could be up to 8 GB (half installed RAM) very rare to see that.

In numbers the Task Manager displays "shared GPU memory 0.7/7.9 GB"

DirectX Diagnostic Tool does not show what the dynamic situation actually is. It just says shared memory 8 GB.

You can be doing absolutely nothing on the computer and easily be using 8-9 gb ram, depending on your background processes,browser extensions, and startup apps. Maybe this example of mine will help to make it clearer. The only window I had actively open when I made this screenshot was task manager. This is why as Windows 11 has evolved, IMO for folks with 8gb of ram is no longer sufficient for anyone to get any performance at all.

My laptop with only Firefox running with 12 tabs

System RAM
Total: 32GB
Available: 16.8 GB

GPU0 (integrated): Radeon 680M
RAM (dedicated): 407/448 MB
RAM (shared): 0.9/15.6 GB

GPU1 (discrete): Nvidia RTX 3060 Laptop
RAM (dedicated): 0.0/6 GB
RAM (shared): 0.0/15.6 GB

Click to expand...