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I have HP motherboard with ATI Radeon HD 4650 1GB AGP and 1GB of RAM. This month I started to upgrade my PC. I wanted to disable Floppy drive. I went to BIOS and found that my AGP aperture size was 64 mb, that means that it's using my RAM, but Windows 7 with all applications uses about 60-65% of RAM. So to free RAM I changed the value to minimum (4 MB). After reboot my resolution was at 800x600 and ATI Catalyst said that something gone wrong with drivers or hardware. Also Aero went off.

So my question is: why this happens and what value I can use to enable Aero because even 64 MB is very important for me.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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You really don't need to be managing RAM at this level. Windows 7 is smart enough to free/page RAM the moment you need it, so manually sparing out 60 MB has no effect. I don't see what problem you have given that you still have 40% free. If that's not enough, why not just buy 1 GB of ram instead of wasting a lot of time on monitoring your memory?

The reason that it doesn't work is because the AGP Aperture Size is too small; so, increase it again...

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  • Can my Aero work better if I change to bigger value? Should I try it or can you explain me something?
    – Little Helper
    Sep 19, 2011 at 18:24
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    @Robrok: Read What is AGP Aperture Size for more details, the important part: Setting the Aperture Size to too small values could result in running out of available texture memory especially on a low-mem video card. So, yes, increasing it's value allows you to have enough available texture memory. Also note that, you need this for more than Aero alone...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Sep 19, 2011 at 18:26
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Aperture Size isn't taking real, physical RAM. It takes Address Space. You've got 4 GB of that, assuming Windows 7 32 bits (232 is 4 billion). Since you only have 1 GB of RAM, and a 1 GB videocard, there's plenty of that 2GB left over.

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