You're being kind of elusive here -- what kind of environment are you in where the BIOS is locked and you have to create a program for this specific kind of computer -- its sounding more and more like you're a (high-school?) student.

The first thing I'd do is talk to your network admin and tell him about this 4MB mess. Presuming they're running Windows Vista or better, I'm sure Window's would love a little more VRAM to work with, and those computers would feel twice as snappy with even a modest amount of shared video memory of 32 or 64 MB. Its either an oversight, or a misguided attempt to prevent games from running on the machines that is throwing basic desktop performance out the door baby-with-the-bathwater-style.

The GMA3100x is hardly a performance king, but it at least supports a relatively modern feature-set. It's even got programmable shader support (pixel shaders in hardware, vertex shaders in the driver software).


Anyhow, what's your situation with these machines? what kind of access/control do you have? do you have any influence with the admin? If not, why are you writing a program for these specific machines?

DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 1.5. As long as you stay within these limits it really should run on everything that is still operating nowadays.