I know this sounds kind of like a stupid, common-sense question, but I don't know much about hardware and how they work, so bear with me, okay? :) I got a new laptop last Fall - it came with 512MB of memory. 128MB was donated to the video card. I have an option in the BIOS to lower the memory for the video card to as low as 16MB. My question is, what are the effects of lowering the video memory? Will this affect how I watch DVD's? Will lowering the memory wear out the video card more? SHould I leave it at 128MB, or is 32-64MB good enough for watching good-quality DVD's? Thanks so much for your input. It is greatly appreciated. -Andrew

128meg is way overkill for DVD. My old Dell laptop only has an 8 meg video card in it and I can watch DVD's on it without any skipping. 128 is good for gaming. Try lowering it down to 16 to 32 meg. You probably won't notice any difference unless your a heavy gamer.

Watching dvd's is likely irrelevant. Most if not all graphics cards have dvd decoding support anyway, already built in. So the only important thing about meory is havign enough to display 24 or 32 bit color. And 16 meg is enough. But... when it comes to gaming, then you need to ramp it up. if you never game, I wouldn't imagine you care so dedicate the memory to your system instead.