GMA 3150 VRAM is 8Mb at boot but shows more in Windows.

I recently reinstalled Starter in my dual-boot 1001pxd netbook (got corrupted somehow and I was not in the mood to waste hours troubleshooting an OS I use very rarely), and I noticed something weird.

the integrated graphics gets 8 MB of "dedicated" RAM from the BIOS (as when booting it says "2039 MB available" and I know that 2 GB are 2048 MB). No way of telling this from BIOS settings as it's pretty damn basic. So far so good.

When checked with any program like CPU-Z or HWInfo32 before installing its own driver (generic VGA adapter driver, shitty resolution) it still shows 8Mb.

Then after the driver is installed the same programs as above claim it now has 256 Mb while at boot it still says the same (I guess a driver can't mod the bios)

And when I do Screen Resolution ---> advanced I get this:


does anyone know what the above means?

It appears that the driver can allocate more RAM if needed to the GMA 3150, up to a semi-comical 256 Mb (as it's probably too weak to use more than 100-ish Mb anyway), but I wanted to ask if there is someone that actually knows what is happening.

From looking at the specs here:
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 - NotebookCheck.net Tech
it looks like your idea is correct: the graphics can claim more VRAM on it's own. It looks like it could take 384MB if it wanted to! 8MB is probably just the base VRAM needed to run.