Vista on an NC8000?

Anyone install Vista on a HP Compaq NC8000? I just got a good deal on one on ebay and wanted to try Vista on it since I haven't been able to play with it much.

Now I find out that the NC8000 isn't on the "HP Certified" list. From past experience, I'm sure this probably doesn't totally void it from the upgrade. But I thought I'd ask here first so I don't waste hours trying to get it working if it definitely won't work.

 

*bump*

Anyone?

 

Vista should have no problems installing on that system. The only issue would be the graphics card does not support the Aero GUI which means it will only run with the Vista Basic interface.

 

I *vaguely* recall someone at my school with an nw8000 running Vista. I'm not 100% on the details though or if he just had a Vista-style skin for XP.

BTW the nw8000 is simple the workstation/ISV certified version of the nc8000. It has a slightly different graphics card.

 

The NC8000 can indeed run Vista and you should be able to get Aero to work on it (assuming you've got the 64M+up Radeon 9600). The biggest hitch you'll have aside from having to cobble together drivers is that the SD card reader will work as "read only" being that there's no Vista driver for it. Assuming you're game, make sure you've got at least 1 gig of RAM in it (get the 2 gigs if you can afford it). If you've got any more questions, ask away and I'll see if I can help out.

 

Heh, I got compiz (linux's aero) running on radeon 7500 with 32MB of video ram.
Take that MS

 

Got Vista installed and it's running great so far. Even with the stock 512 megs of ram-- extra gig is on the way though.

Only question I have is about drivers. In the device manager there are two devices that Vista doesn't have drivers for...

Base System Device
Unknown Device

Any ideas what they are? I'm not sure if XP drivers on HP's site work on Vista.

Also, are there any drivers I should find updates for? I'm assuming I should update the video drivers for best performance if I plan on playing any games.

 

I had the same problem
Here was the solution for XP:
http://www.infohq.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/topic.cgi?forum=4&topic=67&start=30

Yeah video drivers should be updated.
Also update the bios.

 

I told Vista to search online for the drivers. It found the driver for the unknown device, but not for the base system device.

Trying the above now...

 

For me, it was the TPM chip(never knew i had one)
Also, what video drivers are you using?

 

The last set of video card drivers that were available from ATI were Catalyst 7.3. ATI doesn't support OEM Mobility Radeon anymore themselves so they don't offer the drivers on the site anymore (you can still find them around the net). If you don't mind using a hacked driver, you can mod the desktop Vista Catalyst driver from ATI (7.9 is the current one I think) with the Mobility Modder program available at DriverHeaven and install that so you'll have the latest and greatest (I have 7.8 and can confirm it works). Just make sure you follow the directions carefully!

The base system device is the SD card reader driver...best you're going to do at this point is get the card reader to work as "read only"...the XP driver won't let you write to the card (it'll constantly complain that the card is write protected, even if it isn't)

 

In case any of the experimenters still are lurking, Vista SP1 apparently fixes the SD card reader (can read and write to it)