m1210 and Vista. Works for the most part

So I loaded up Build 5456 of Vista yesterday. Popped in the dvd and did a complete wipe of the main partition [i think dell's custom partition's are still there but don't really care - who's just going to watch a dvd and not do other stuff in the background?!?]. Vista installed in about 40 mins.

Detected the audio just fine - DON'T load the sigmatel audio drivers, they don't work. I did and when I reverted back to the Vista supplied drivers audio only works until I suspend/sleep the laptop, upon waking up, no sound [I think the laptop's outputting the sound to one of the headphone jacks instead of the speakers].

Loaded the intel chipset drivers from dells web site, no problem.
Had to load the hacked inf/driver for nvidia's latest driver release. I found some site called drivers2go or something like that which gave me the info. Powerdvd, windows media, photoshop all work fine.

Nero 7 doesn't work. 6.6 ultra does.

Office 2007 works

Intel wifi drivers load but won't run [error, wrong os]. The ms supplied drivers found and connected to my wpa-aes network no problem. Zero dropouts - perhaps the Wireless Zero Config service is finally mature!

firefox no problem.

skype, loads but haven't tested.

webcam drivers no problem

symantec av for vista no problem

dell quickset no problem, although vista comes with a pretty complex and neat power management app - i'm not sure if quickset is needed.

flashfxp works

netstumbler broker

googleearth beta 4 broken

winamp, winrar, quicktime/real alternative all work

spybot/adaware no problem

bittorrent works

laptop hibernates and suspends just fine (6 seconds to wakeup). takes about 30 seconds to get to login screen (from cold boot).

ricoh xd driver doesn't load. sd/mmc works.

aero glass works, but i think it's a battery hog. i got about 3 hours with all the fancy stuff turned on and 2nd to highest brightness. i got 4+ with dell's stock MCE load.


meh...it's vista. it's xp with a new face. i read an article saying that xp would be vista's biggest competitor. having run vista for a day i can see why. there's just not a lot here that's doin it for someone who's not hooked up to a corporate network or cares more about speed/battery life than flashy fading windows and semitransparent games of tic-tac-toe.


m1210, 1.83, 1gb, 60gb 5400rpm, webcam, 9cell
<brag>with 3 yr complete care warranty: ~$1080 AR/AC</brag>

 

Remember this is still a beta. So when the final version comes out all that stuff will be ok. Plus the final vista will have DX10 (likley) so I think it will be worth it. But thanks anyway for giving us a view of how the beta does on the 1210.

 

There will be no compelling reason for anyone to buy Vista, if their Xp is running OK. Most will wait until they get Vista pre-installed with their next computer...

 

concurred (and here's your 10 characters)

 

Any thoughts on how well Vista would work with the Intel Graphics Card instead of the Nvidia?

 

It's supposed to work with the GMA 950. I'm in your position as well and have done some ressearch on the subject and from what I can gather the GMA should run Aero Glass but I don't know for sure.

And by then it will be stable, asssuming you just bought a laptop with XP(like me) and were to upgrade in 2 years.

 

I have Vista on my E1405 and from what I've used it for its been great. I cannot find a way to enable Aero on it and I also tried using a few tricks to enable it but to no avail.

 

well my D820 (see sig) is pretty much the best you can get in a laptop right now (less the graphics card which is a 512MB turbocache 7400go-but still plenty powerful for vista aero, by far) and with 2GB of RAM it shouldnt be an issue, so I kno i'll be able to run vista real well, but I'll get the upgrade for free from my college when it comes out so I'll just do the upgrade when my college does the switch, prolly a year or two

 

Man, and I always thought I was the only one to feel this way! Thank you!
Vista really does look like XP 1.5 to me, can't beleive it took stupid Microsoft 5 years to make this pile of junk!
I can't beleive I'm actually starting to like Macs a bit more now, the worlds coming to an end!!!

 

weres this beta available at?

 

Do you have all the right drivers for it? My friend is on the list to try Vista betta so we installed it on one of the desktops at work. It ran fine but Aero wouldn't run. We were forced to remove vista from the machine before we got all of the right drivers for it.

 

I tried Vista Beta 2 on my old C640... for about three hours. I knew I wasn't gonna be able to run Aero, but I wasn't expecting to. Unfortunately, despite Microsoft's claims, Vista is NOT for computers with 512 megs of RAM. The computer was constantly processing... something. I don't know what. I'm really looking forward to Vista and all that it could offer, but right now I'll stick with XP as my main OS. I reformatted the Latitude to Ubuntu after about an hour or two of Vista use. Just couldn't see dealing with the very slow performance.