My ram is going away?

I got a new computer in December and it had 1 gig of ram. Now it has 958 megabites of ram. How come it is going away? I have Windows Vista.

Also, I have another computer with Windows XP. I got it brand new and it said on the box that I had 512 megabites of ram but a couple months after I had it, it said that I had about 350 megabites of ram. How come it is dissapearing? Is something permanently getting stored to it or something?

I have AntiVir PE Classic for my virus protection (it has a red umbrella if that helps you recognise it at all) and it says that I don't have any viruses. I tried this on both computers and also I tried mcafee on the computer with XP and it says that I'm good.

My ram is going away?kawasaki

Actually the 'missing' ram isnt missing at all, its being used for something else. Its likely you have what is called 'Integrated Graphics' which uses some of the system memory (RAM) as video memory, making it look like you have less memory than you actually do. Its nothing to worry about and perfectly normal.

My ram is going away?nortan antivirus

Your RAM isn't going away, you are using it. Here is a pretty close example of how it works:

RAM can be compared to a person's short-term memory and the hard disk to the long-term memory. The short-term memory focuses on work at hand, but can only keep so many facts in view at one time. If short-term memory fills up, your brain sometimes is able to refresh it from facts stored in long-term memory. A computer also works this way. If RAM fills up, the processor needs to continually go to the hard disk to overlay old data in RAM with new, slowing down the computer's operation. Unlike the hard disk which can become completely full of data so that it won't accept any more, RAM never runs out of memory. It keeps operating, but much more slowly than you may want it to.