Installing Vista on "Unworthy" Hardware: The Results Are Better Than You Think

[Jason Dunn]

The big question many people have is whether or not their hardware will support Vista enough to run it, or if they should just keep XP until they buy a new machine. Common consensus among much of the media reporting today is that Vista requires a new PC, Vista without Aero isn't worth the upgrade, and that Vista is a system hog. Today I disproved many of those assumptions.<br /><br /><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop1small.jpg" /><br /><i>Image 1: What the non-Aero interface looks like on Vista. <a href="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop1.jpg">[Click for the full-sized image]</a>.</i><br /><br />In the Dunn household, mixed operating system environments are something I avoid at all costs. When I switch to a new OS, every computer I have switches to a new OS just to keep my life simple. Vista presents an interesting challenge, especially when you consider that there are three laptops in my house: my wife Ashley has a Toshiba M50, I have a Fujitsu P7020, and a Fujitsu N6220. Laptops quite often require specific drivers from the manufacturer, and XP on a laptop without the right drivers is usually a recipe for disaster. Worse still, I ran the <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor/default.mspx">Vista Upgrade Advisor</a> on the Toshiba M50 and with it's crap-tastic Intel graphics chip, it didn't seem like it would run Vista all that well (the software advised I could run Vista Home Basic). It did have 1.5 GB of RAM however, and a Pentium M CPU at 1.73 Ghz, so I thought "Well...maybe." The install of XP Professional had somehow become completely trashed - the registry was unable to be written to - so I didn't have much to lose.<!><br /><br /><span><b>The Install</b></span><br />The Vista Ultimate install went quickly, and I was surprised when the laptop booted up and everything looked just as nice as every other Vista install I'd seen. I was sure I'd have to struggle to get the right graphics driver at the very least (always a problem on laptops). There was no Aero Glass - it defaulted to the non 3D/transparent window effects - but everything still looked great. The laptop was at it's native resolution of 1280 x 768 and 32 bit colour. I was expecting to see many missing items in the device manager, but interestingly enough there were only two: the mass storage controller and the audio controller: Vista identified every other piece of hardware. I brought up the wireless networking tool (yes, it installed the on-board WiFi without a hitch) and entered in my WPA password. <br /><br />About 10 seconds later, Vista informed me that it had found a "solution to my problem" and the next thing I knew the Realtek on-board audio was installed and I had sound. Wow. I don't care what anyone says, that's damn slick that Vista was able to seamlessly identify the missing hardware, install a driver, and fix the problem all without a <i>single</i> user prompt or security warning. That's exactly the way an operating system should work.<br /><br /><span><b>Real Life Use</b></span><br />So how does Vista Ultimate work on this laptop? Well, the Windows Vista Experience Index on this laptop is 1.0. Yeah - the big one-dot-oh. When I saw that I thought it was the kiss of death. It ranked between 3.8 and 4.2 for the CPU, RAM, and hard drive performance - it's just the graphics ranked at 1.0 and 1.9 that give it the 1.0 rating. Here's the really interesting part: I installed Office 2007, and used the laptop for performing the same basic tasks my wife will perform on it (email, Word Processing, Web access). In every way, I found it performed as fast as, or faster than, Windows XP Professional. I could find no issues with running Vista on it. The only snag I ran into was that some of the programs require a Direct X 9 video card, so I was unable to use them. So far that seems to only be Windows Movie Maker, and Windows DVD Maker - neither application likely to ever be used by my wife. Every other program, including Windows Media Center, worked without a hitch.<br /><br />Would newer, faster hardware give an even better Windows Vista experience? Certainly. But does Vista perform sufficiently well on this laptop to keep it instead of going back to XP Professional? You bet - the performance is snappy, and even without Aero Glass, Vista contains a wealth of user interface enhancements and security improvements that will make for a better experience. Now I'll just have to see if my wife likes using Vista and Office 2007: that's a lot of change at once. Perhaps that's my next article...<br /><br /><i>Jason Dunn owns and operates <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's liking Vista more and more.</i>

[Outlaw94]

That is nice to hear about your experience.

Late last night I installed Vista Home Premium on my Samsung Q1. It too is rated at 1.0 but after the install which took about 35 minutes, runs just as fast or faster (at somethings) than XP did on it before. The only drivers Vista didn;t load in was the bluetooth driver and the audio driver. Again I did this pretty late and haven't had a chance to load those driver in or any of my software. So far though, I am satisfied with the experience. I decided that at the end of the day if I don't enjoy the experience of Vista on my Q1 I have a Dell laptop that is pretty loaded and would have to trouble running Vista. I could always put it on the Dell. I ran a Beta on it a few months ago and really liked it.

Anyway I'll keep you posted on the Q1 driver situation.

[Gary Sheynkman]

hey jason,

have you tried running photoshop on the said machine???

[Jason Dunn]

have you tried running photoshop on the said machine???

Photoshop? Nope. I don't even own Photoshop.

[bmhome1]

Photoshop CS2 runs great in Vista, even with Motion 1300 1GZ slate tablet. Three elements far, far more essential than CPU or graphics (non-Aero UI) for good Vista speed are maximum RAM (1GB or more), a fast hard drive (7200rpm laptop drive compensates lower CPU) and PLENTY of free partition space (30GB or more) all for helping along Vista's thirst for paging and RAM swapping efficiently.

[Damion Chaplin]

I don't even own Photoshop.

Might I ask what you do use for photo manipulation?

[Tim Williamson]

I did a clean install of Vista Ultimate on a Gateway 1.73 GHz lappy with 512 MB RAM and the crappy Intel built-in video, the only drivers it didn't have were the multi-card reader and the Synaptics touchpad (not sure why it didn't include this). I downloaded the XP drivers from Gateway and both installed without a hitch. It took about 45 minutes (including the hardware indexing) to completely install.

It doesn't run Aero Glass, but overall it seems to run the same or a little quicker than XP (although I haven't installed antivirus yet or any 3rd-party apps).

I'm thinking of eventually picking up a new hard drive and doing a clean install on my main PC after a few months.

[Jason Dunn]

Might I ask what you do use for photo manipulation?

Fast and Dirty: ACDSee Pro
Slow and Detailed: Photoshop Elements 5.0 or Dx0 Optics Pro

Been thinking about getting Photoshop CS3 when it comes out though...

[Damion Chaplin]

So you do own Photoshop, just not Photoshop 'Ultimate'. :wink:

[Damion Chaplin]

Here's a stupid question I haven't yet found the answer to: If the machine won't run Aero Glass, will it still run 'Luna'? In other words, does Vista include XP-style themes (which most computers will run, unlike Aero), or are you stuck with 'Windows Classic' theme if you can't run Aero?

[Tim Williamson]

It runs a somewhat plain looking skin, I wish there were a way to change the color of the plain skin to black.

[Gary Sheynkman]

Jason...what kind of nerd are you?!???!

:lol:

I have to say that I am now looking to toss my desktop

I dont edit video nor do I watch HD content.

I Office 07, Raw, and photoshop on it

My thinkpad x60 docked to all my toys has been the best setup...just pick up and go

[Jason Dunn]

Here's a stupid question I haven't yet found the answer to: If the machine won't run Aero Glass, will it still run 'Luna'?

Here's a crappy graphic that shows the difference:

http://www.jydesign.com/blog/images/windows-theme.jpg

I'll do up a screenshot later tonight...

[Tim Williamson]

Is there any way (other than using WindowBlinds) to change the "New Windows Standard" from light blue to black?

[Jason Dunn]

Two screen shots of non-Aero Vista:

http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop1.jpg

http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop2.jpg

[Tim Williamson]

Two screen shots of non-Aero Vista:

http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop1.jpg

http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop2.jpg

-9 degrees??? Eek... 8O

[Jason Dunn]

Jason...what kind of nerd are you?!???!

One who understands that Photoshop is a pre-press, CMYK tool that is gross overkill for 95% of all photo editing, and expensive, and a tool that most people think they need due to peer pressure? ;-)

[Jason Dunn]

Is there any way (other than using WindowBlinds) to change the "New Windows Standard" from light blue to black?

Nope, afraid not. I thought there was a way but the colour shifting effect is part of Aero (it's very cool and simple to use). Hopefully someone will come up with Vista themes that will work around this...

[Jason Dunn]

-9 degrees??? Eek... 8O

Yeah, it's a bit chilly - but -9 Celsius isn't too bad. I only start to dislike it when it hits -20 Celsius. -40 Celsius with the wind chill is when I seek shelter. ;-)

[RenesisX]

Thank you very much for this Jason.

I was trying all day to finally decide whether to bite the bullet and try Vista on my M50 which I use as my primary PC. (I have the same 1.5Gb of RAM).

I need a repave of XP and I'd finally decided Vista would be insane. But now I've read this I'm all excited to image off my PC and reinstall tomorrow.

Thanks for taking the pain to try this out :)

[Jason Dunn]

http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/dmt/2007/vista-theme-desktop2.jpg

It's worth noting how stupid iTunes looks there. Their faux-metal skin has always been cheesy, but now it just looks ultra-lame...I really hope they'll improve that on the PC side of things. :?

[Janak Parekh]

-9 degrees??? Eek... 8O
Uh, t-will... you realize Canada uses degrees Celsius, right? -9C is merely 16F. New York was about 10F on Friday morning...

Jason: thanks for the pics of non-Aero Vista pics. I think it looks pretty good. I'd have installed it by now, but I still have a few apps (read: pcANYWHERE) that aren't Vista-compatible yet. I should try installing it as a virtual machine anyway to start playing with it. Maybe once my thesis is done. ;)

--janak

[Janak Parekh]

It's worth noting how stupid iTunes looks there. Their faux-metal skin has always been cheesy, but now it just looks ultra-lame...I really hope they'll improve that on the PC side of things. :?
Well, iTunes has always looked exactly the same on the Mac and on Windows. If you watch the original keynote, it was advertised as such, and the fact that it's been this way since v4 suggests it'll continue to be so. Interestingly, there has been a nontrivial share of Mac users who don't like the "darker" brushed look introduced by iTunes 7 as opposed to previous versions.

--janak