[studioartist]

I am only showing 1780 after they installed 2, 2gig ddr2 sticks, originally two 512's on Acer 5520-5568, says expandable to 4. task manager says1789
Vista home premium

[Rollin' Rog]

Who is "they"?

Laptops are very easy to relace memory in -- but it sounds like either one is bad or not seated properly.

It's an easy "do it yourself" -- if you want. Take the battery out; unplug -- find the right memory door under the laptop -- remove one or two screws.

You will see the slots. lift them up, There may or may not be a lever on each side of each module just bend them back sligtly and wiggle the modules out.

Replace one at a time and put things back together and test.

Either that or take it back to "they".

The procedure normally looks something like this:

http://www.fonerbooks.com/laptop_2.htm

http://www.computermemoryupgrade.net...op-memory.html

[jbhardman]

Sounds like a bad stick or they're not installed correctly... However, unless you have 64 bit Vista, you won't see all 4 gigs anyway. But you should see somewhere around 3.5. Then if you have shared memory with your video card it will be even less.

[studioartist]

not wanting to touch my new machine I had the installer wiggle and check ram, now showing 3.0 guess the rest is ate up on operating system, sound card and display?. can I allocate more for photoshop? THX for the advice

[Rollin' Rog]

You can't specifically allocate memory to an application; but if you have 3 gigs available -- I doubt you really need more anyway. Is the program not operating smoothly?

You can open the Task Manager (right click on lower task bar) and open the performance monitor to see how much physical memory is actually in use at any given time.

Ignore the so-called "free" memory data -- this is just misleading.