512MB sticks show up as 446MB

[Oroka Sempai]

A friend of mine just got a cheap-o referb eMachines T5230, 1gb DDR2, Vista Home Premium... blah blah blah. Anyways, both her sticks of RAM are only showing up as 446MB rather than 512MB, together or individually. I cant imagine this being a problem with the RAM itself, but a mobo problem. I will proably have the system in my posession tomorrow, but I am just trying to get a head start on where to look first.

[meionm]

Maybe shared memory with intergraded graphic card.

[Oroka Sempai]

That is what eMachine told her, but shouldnt the sticks still show up as 512MB, or does this detraction happen in the BIOS?

She is getting BSODs, and eMachine tried telling her that her printer was causing the BSODs but after pulling the printer, it still crashes.

[Old Thrashbarg]

or does this detraction happen in the BIOS?

Yep, it's a low-level thing. Although it's a bit unusual for it to be showing the memory allocated from each stick... usually it just shows total graphics allocation. I guess it makes sense, though, if you consider that there's 128mb graphics memory allocated, with 64mb from each channel of a dual-channel ram configuration.