Video Card Showing Only 14 MB of Memory
Posted on August 19, 2010
I recently installed a nVidia 8400GS 265MB video card in a Windows Vista computer. Installing was straight forward and I installed the drivers from the CD.
When the computer rebooted I noticed that the screen resolution was very low. Just to make sure the new card was not bad I ran a quick diagnostic on the video card. The one thing that I did notice was it was reporting that this card had only 14 MB of memory (that’s was so 1998).
At the time I was also reinstalling the operating system, so when the system updates where ready to install. I installed them at the same time. What happened next was that the Windows Update tries to install a different driver version on top of the driver that I had just installed from the CD that came with the Video card.
To solve this problem all I had to do is reinstall the factory Windows Vista driver and the card worked perfectly.
The lesson learned is not to install more than one Windows update, software package or driver that will need to reboot.