extra ram not fully functioning

I purchased a 1gb stick of ddr2. Ive installed it and it seems to be working but not fully.

Prior to the install I checked the computer stats and it had that there was 448mb of ram. Now that ive installed 1gb as well its showing up as 896. Surely that shpuld be 1.4 gb. I used the crucial.com scanner so know that the laptop can cope with more memory than is installed

Does anyone know why this happened ?

Thanks

thank you , will try that

It may be the laptop is expecting 2 of the same size dimms, have you tried removing the existing one and just running with the 1gig dimm?
If that reports 1gig then add in the other dimm to the spare slot and see what it reports it as

How old is the laptop? Some computers need the memory in balanced pairs.

the computers only three years old. Thats not considered old is it ??

going to try removing one lot before i try the BIOS thingy. Have to go out and borrow a screw driver again first

3 years would be considered a bit old, I doubt it would be the bios and just running with the 1 gig dimm should work however the other dimm may not be picked up or you may get an error - typically the dimms have to be in pairs of the same type and size so you many need another 1 gig dimm if you want more than a gig