Inspirion 1501 have a problem with video memory size

Your integrated video chip, not a dedicated video card is taking some of your onboard main memory as Rebel9 stated, and if you do not have enough to begin with, that video chip will not take as much.  For Vista you should have 2 Gb to run it at its best, and still have more for the integrated video chip.  Vista will run better, but gaming is iffy for some of the higher graphical intensive games.  Some games will not run at all with that system. 

 

A game system requirement link to test your system to see if you can play that game on your computer

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest  

I have 1,5 gb of system memory. And in XP i have this posibility to change size of video memory to 256. One time Installed Vista up on Xp and i had 256 mb of video memory in Vista. But when i formatted HD and installed Vista i had no posibility to change size. 

From Dell:

" HyperMemoryTM  / TurboCacheTM 
Mid-range graphics solutions are designed to deliver a great balance of price and performance. Often labeled HyperMemory or TurboCache, these solutions consist of a discrete GPU often with some discrete graphics memory. The remaining memory allocated to graphics is shared with the system memory."

 

 

"But when i formatted HD and installed Vista i had no posibility to change size."

 

Tep - that's right.

Sounds like a lot of memory being wasted, not having it, BUT.....Actually, I don't think you will see a difference that you can notice.  Its still a integrated, lousy for games video chip.  Will not really improve things in my opinion. 

I think that unlike XP, in which Hyper memory size can be manually chosen, Vista controls memory allocation automatically. If Vista senses your system needs more video mamory, It first checks RAM requirements for "other" processes then if the needed memory is available,based on total RAM in your system-requirements for "other" processes= RAM pool available for Vista to allocate to Video. There is still a limlt to how much your GPU can utilize. It is determined by the manufacturer of the card, not Vista. Vista just knows the amount that is available. I hope I stated this correctly. If my understanding of this is wrong, Experts please set me straight.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/graphicsmemory.mspx