Re: Windows Vista on Toshiba A105

What I've found out since last evening when I posted the original message is that the 900 graphics system in the 915 chipset is hardware capable of running Aero, but that it doesn't actually do so because no driver exists and none is currently planned (could change, but like I said, I'm told that as of now, neither MS nor Intel plans to write the necessary WDDM driver). This in spite of the fact that the Vista Advisor says that it WILL run Aero.


Quaoar wrote:

Barry Watzman wrote:

I installed the latest Vista Beta on a Toshiba A105-S2712 laptop. The Vista advisor, running under XP, says it can run Aero. This laptop has an Intel 915 chipset with Intel Graphics Accelerator 900 chipset video (uses shared memory). This video system can allocate 128MB of video memory and supports Pixel Shader 2 and DX9. The computer has a gigabyte of total memory. The CPU is a Pentium M 1.73GHz (not a Celeron).

My questions all revolve around running Aero the Aero interface on this system.

First, how can I tell if Aero is running? If Aero is like an Orgasm ("if you don't know if you are running it, you are not"), then I'm not running Aero. There is nothing spectacularly different that reaches out and shakes me, no transparent see-through Windows or anything like that.

Second, if I'm not running it, is there anything in Vista itself that will come right out and tell me if I'm running Aero, if not why not, and is there anything I can do turn Aero on if it's currently off?

[Note, I'm using pretty much "Classic everything" .... start menu, desktop, folders]

[The A105 series is insanely popular right now, and it's interesting to note that the Toshiba web site lists over FIVE DOZEN different "configuration models" (the "-Snnnn" suffix) of the A105, ranging from $399 Celeron configurations to $1,400 Core Duo configurations. Probably more configurations of a single model than Toshiba has ever offered. Which suggests that a huge number of people will ultimately be interested in the answer to this.]

Thanks


OK, I took some time with my Beta 2, and I believe that if you use Classic menus, etc., Aero is largely inoperative. The Welcome Center has everything one needs to invoke the Aero interface, check the 'quality' of the computer - three is good, etc. I have read various that the 900 IGA does/does not work for aero, but the IGA 950 is 'expected' to work. The best that I've read is that the video base for Aero is still a moving target especially since the report a month ago that the highest invocation of aero would require a dedicated GPU with min 512MB dedicated VRAM.

I will say that that Beta2 is faster than hell compared to my install of XP on an Intel 840 dual core since it appears to be heavily threaded. OTOH, Microsoft has a long row to hoe to get this ready for release in under a year. Vista is very stable, fast, but largely incomplete. One notorious error is that the Windows Live Mail app cannot download more than about 4k of newsgroups, making it useless for reporting to this NG while in the OS - I'm wondering if by design!

The other thing is that the 'eye candy' appeal will wear off quickly, making Aero another MS misstep. The underlying OS is pretty good, but nothing at all compared to the latest Mac operating systems that are tailored for access to the underlying functionality for multimedia and other user functions. There are still far too many changes from XP that appear to have been made for the sake of change rather than for the sake of functionality, making access to common functions unnecessarily cumbersome. The tortuous shutdown/restart command invoked from a tiny icon is one of the more glaring of these errors. Many of the user functions that we have grown to 'love' have also been changed for no apparent reason other than that section of developers were charged with making a change. Overall, eye candy good; usability, suffering. IMO.

Q
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Relevant Pages

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