Will Vista Work On My Laptop?

[Guest]

Hi, I have an acer ferrari 3000 and would like to know wether vista home
premium will run ok on it. I am currently unning xp home sp2, mega fast! I
have downloaded Microsoft's upgrade advisor and it tells me that the best one
for me is the home basic, that my ATI 9200 and RAM needed upgrading. I did
some re-search and found a great advisor on the ATI website. It told me that
the only thing wrong with my ATI 9200 was the fact that the pixel shader
version was 1.4 and not 2.0 like vista wants! The RAM I am planning to
upgrade to 2 gb soon so that is not a problem. I was wondering if anyone had
tryed to run vista on an acer ferrari 3000 and would be greatful to know if
it worked or not and wether I need to find a cheaty way of updating my ATI
driver to give me the pixel shader 2.0 version.
Thanks would be greatful to anyone whom could help!

SPECS:

AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ (1.86ghz or more, depending on the battery+pwr option)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 128mb
2 Gigabytes of RAM (well soon anyway!)
Runs XP Like a dream!

 

[Lee]

Hi, I have an acer ferrari 3000 and would like to know wether vista home
premium will run ok on it. I am currently unning xp home sp2, mega fast! I
have downloaded Microsoft's upgrade advisor and it tells me that the best
one
for me is the home basic, that my ATI 9200 and RAM needed upgrading. I did
some re-search and found a great advisor on the ATI website. It told me
that
the only thing wrong with my ATI 9200 was the fact that the pixel shader
version was 1.4 and not 2.0 like vista wants! The RAM I am planning to
upgrade to 2 gb soon so that is not a problem. I was wondering if anyone
had
tryed to run vista on an acer ferrari 3000 and would be greatful to know
if
it worked or not and wether I need to find a cheaty way of updating my ATI
driver to give me the pixel shader 2.0 version.
Thanks would be greatful to anyone whom could help!

SPECS:

AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ (1.86ghz or more, depending on the battery+pwr
option)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 128mb
2 Gigabytes of RAM (well soon anyway!)
Runs XP Like a dream!

There is no "cheaty" way to upgrade a video card. I like Vista very much,
but I would not upgrade an XP machine that is running like a dream without
adequate hardware.

 

[gls858]

Hi, I have an acer ferrari 3000 and would like to know wether vista home
premium will run ok on it. I am currently unning xp home sp2, mega fast! I
have downloaded Microsoft's upgrade advisor and it tells me that the best one
for me is the home basic, that my ATI 9200 and RAM needed upgrading. I did
some re-search and found a great advisor on the ATI website. It told me that
the only thing wrong with my ATI 9200 was the fact that the pixel shader
version was 1.4 and not 2.0 like vista wants! The RAM I am planning to
upgrade to 2 gb soon so that is not a problem. I was wondering if anyone had
tryed to run vista on an acer ferrari 3000 and would be greatful to know if
it worked or not and wether I need to find a cheaty way of updating my ATI
driver to give me the pixel shader 2.0 version.
Thanks would be greatful to anyone whom could help!

SPECS:

AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ (1.86ghz or more, depending on the battery+pwr option)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 128mb
2 Gigabytes of RAM (well soon anyway!)
Runs XP Like a dream!

If it runs XP like a dream why change it? The home basic won't get you
any of the eye candy, which some people seem fascinated with for some
reason, anyway. Now if you like to dink around with your computer and
spend time fixing stuff and finding and downloading drivers and updating
programs and buying new ones for the old ones that don't work, then sure
go for it.

gls858

 

[LaRoux]

Vista should run fine on this system. I run Home Premium on a much less
capable Toshiba (Celeron 2.4ghz, 1GB) and other than no Aero Glass, it's
comparable to the experience on XP from a performance perspective.

I don't know of any way to trick the system into thinking the graphics chip
has pixel shader 2.0 when it doesn't support it in the hardware. Others may
have some solution.

Bottom line - if you primarily want Vista for Aero Glass, I think you're out
of luck.

If you just want to run Vista to be running the current technology, you
should be fine. Make sure you can get compatible bios updates if necessary,
as well as drivers for any "laptop specific" features like pointing devices
or touchpads.

 

[Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User]]

Go to the Microsoft Vista web site and download the Upgrade Advisor. Get
the correct answer direct from the source!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradeadvisor.mspx

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

Bottom line - if you primarily want Vista for Aero Glass, I think you're out
of luck.

My Vista laptop has the horsepower to run Aero Glass, but
after trying it out for to weeks I turned that feature off.
I found the blurry text from the 'behind' screen too distracting,
and not conducive to productivity.

 

[Lang Murphy]

Yes, you can run Vista. Any version (with your projected 2GB RAM - any less
than 1GB and you're on your own, son). You won't get Aero, though, in any
version. And I'll take a SWAG and say, no, there's no "cheaty" way to change
your hardware to make Vista believe your video card's got PixelShader 2.0
and not 1.4. If you're lucky, someone will prove me wrong.

You don't disclose what types of apps you run on your Acer Ferrari laptop.
That may, or may not, impact what your performance is like.

A vast majority of the "problems" with Vista have to do with either
non-existant or crappy third party drivers. I would want to know up front,
some call it due diligence, that there were at least Vista drivers for the
laptop. Whether those drivers are decent or crappy I guess you won't know
until you install them.

Can you say "Full and Total Backup or, Even Better, Create Disk Image of XP
state Prior to Installing Vista?" And that's not an indictment of Vista...
that's what one should do whenever one moves from one OS rev to another.

Lang

 

[Guest]

Thanks to everyone who posted a reply. I am not too concerned with having
AERO although it would be nice. I agree with many, now, that if XP runs
nicely I should not change it. I have a friend whom like Gary turned AERO off
as it was too distracting! I only realy use Word and Internet Explorer and
occasionaly MSN but nothing relly crucial that I would miss if they were
incompatible. My father who like to think he knows more than me and he is 73,
says I would be an idiot to buy Vista! I need to ask one more thing, my acer
ferrari came without a XP disk but just a hard drive image! Would this affect
Vista's installaton I also did not get a registration key. But hanks again to
everyone, you've all been a great help, I think that I will get Vista when I
upgrade to a new Laptop when XP support runs out. Seems the most sensible
thing.

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

Thanks to everyone who posted a reply. I am not too concerned with having
AERO although it would be nice. I agree with many, now, that if XP runs
nicely I should not change it. I have a friend whom like Gary turned AERO off
as it was too distracting! I only realy use Word and Internet Explorer and
occasionaly MSN but nothing relly crucial that I would miss if they were
incompatible. My father who like to think he knows more than me and he is 73,
says I would be an idiot to buy Vista! I need to ask one more thing, my acer
ferrari came without a XP disk but just a hard drive image! Would this affect
Vista's installaton I also did not get a registration key.

It should not matter. You could either do an upgrade install of Vista,
or you can even use the upgrade version of Vista to do a clean install:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5932

But hanks again to
everyone, you've all been a great help, I think that I will get Vista when I
upgrade to a new Laptop when XP support runs out. Seems the most sensible
thing.

Agreed. The only reason I have Vista is because it came with a new laptop.
There is no compelling reason to upgrade if XP is working well for you.