Dell, is this a good way to make money?

Dear Dell,

As indicated previously in this blog, I bought a video card that was sold as a 256MB, but in fact it only has 128MB of memory onboard - and it steals the other 128 from the system memory through the video driver.

Unfortunately, in Vista this trick doesn’t work.

There are a few people who have commented about this same problem on my blog, and on your forum.

Tonight I spent about 2 hours with one of your tech support reps. The guy was great, but in the end there was no good resolution. He had me reseat the video card, reset the NVRAM, reinstall the driver twice - and of course none of it worked.

He said he spoke to his manager, and apparently this is a known issue. One that you have received a lot of reports on - for both ATI and nVidia cards.

No kidding - is it because you bury the fact that the 256MB is actually just 128MB in a footnote? Is it because you sell ATI cards with HyperMemory, and nVidia cards with TurboCache - which means “only half the memory advertised”?

The tech rep claimed that a new driver would be available in 2-3 weeks max which would fix this problem. I’ll be sure to check back.

The tech support call I generated tonight probably cost you $10-20. I think you charged me about $50 for this card. There might be another call in about 2-3 weeks if the driver doesn’t work. I’m sure other people have called as well.

Is charging $50 extra for a video card that doesn’t actually have the memory it claims to have (albeit noted in a footnote on a subpage), resulting in customer dsat and support incidents (which cost you money) really a good way to make money?

-Dennis