Video Memory question

Oh yeah! Going to 1.5GB from 500MB alone with give major performance increases across the board for applications. You'll still be limited by the chips memory bandwith, chip MHz, pixel pipes, vertex shaders, and so on, but you'll definitely see a noticeable improvement.

Cheers on the upgrade! What are you playin you your box? Me and some guys are MaddKarma have been trying to put together some groups for Warcraft, CounterStrike and other Gs.

I have a question in the same vein. I recently bought a dv8000t with 1GB system memory and the Geforce Go7400/128MB. When I check with various benchmark and utility programs, it's showing 512MB video memory. Now, I realize that it's probably sharing, but I don't have any options with managing the sharing allocation. I'd like to reduce or even turn off the sharing and just run with the dedicated, but I have no option in the BIOS or in the nvidia settings.
I talked to HP support a few times and have been told various things, ranging from:
1) I have 512 MB dedicated video memory, supported by the fact that when viewing System Properties from My Comp it shows all of my system ram (1GB), whereas if there was memory shared it the system ram would be reduced by the shared amount (true??) to
2) I need an "expansion card" in the expansion slot in order to have dedicated video memory, without it all of the memory is shared.
I know #2 can't be right, but I wonder about #1.

To add confusion, some of the info showing in the benchmark seems very strange like:
the bus width = 256-bit (can't be right)
the 2D core and memory frequencies are lower than the 3D core/mem freqs
total vid mem shows 512M, texture mem ~369M

Can anybody explain this, at least better than the HP "support"?

for the record:
I'm using PC Wizard 2006 v1.68
3DMark05 score ~ 2000
HP Pavilion dv8000t CTO NB
XP Home SP2
CoreDuo processor T2400 (1.83 GHz)
17.0" WXGA+ BrightView (1440x900)
128MB NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) Go 7400
1.0GB DDR2 SDRAM (2x512MB)
80 GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive
DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network w/Bluetooth

Thanks, I do like the dv8000t. It's got a big screen and is pretty comfortable to use (except for the weight of carrying it around!). As long as it will run NWN2 when it comes out later this year, I'll be happy (I think Oblivion might be a bit of a stretch for the Go7400).
But I'm still bugged about the vid memory question, because I can't see HP putting in 512M of dedicated on the motherboard. Here's what PCWizard said about the videocard data (note the absurdly high bus width and the low memory GPU frequency/bandwidth - I mean come on, my low end FX5500 card at work has a memory bandwidth of almost 10x this!):

Total Memory : 512 MB
Texture Memory : 369 MB
Processor : GeForce Go 7400
Converter : Integrated RAMDAC
Refresh Rate (min/max) : 59/60 Hz
GPU Information :
Number of GPU : 1
Codename : NV46
Revision : A3
Bus : 256-bit
Memory Type : SDRAM
GPU Frequency : 1350 MHz - [initial : 450 MHz]
Memory Frequency GPU : 22.65 MHz - [initial : 700 MHz]
Memory Bandwidth : 725 MB/s
GPU Configuration :
2D Core : 100 MHz
2D Memory : 270 MHz
3D Performance Core : 450 MHz
3D Performance Memory : 700 MHz
3D Reduced Power Core : 200 MHz
3D Reduced Power Memory : 400 MHz