Is your computer ready for Vista?
Microsoft recently launched their GetReady section on their Vista page and what immediately caught my eye was the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor Beta. The specifications and requirements of Vista have been blurry and like me you may be wondering if your current computer(s) will be able to run Microsoft's next great OS. This is just a beta like everything related to Vista these days but it was fun for me to see if my Lenovo X41 Tablet PC would be up to the task of running Vista. I installed the Advisor and ran it to see if my machine even stood a chance. Read on to see the results...
After installing the advisor on your machine you're asked a few questions on what you would like to use your machine for. I selected everything so I could run all tests. A few seconds later and the results were in. Congratulations! Your PC can run the core experience of Windows Vista was displayed nicely before my eyes. It was actually not all that much of a surprise. I already knew I wouldn't install Vista on my X41 right away anyways. The long term goal is to graduate around May next year, seek out employment and hopefully acquire some funds to possibly buy a new dual core Lenovo Tablet PC already installed with Vista. I don't even know if most laptops will ship out with Vista preloaded when it is suppose to be released in January next year. Anyways like I said I knew it could run the core value so I have the option to at least take advantage of the new Tablet PC features if I want.
What kind of shocked me was the next part about Aero Glass. I never really expected to run Aero Glass on my Tablet PC (it already has performance issues because of the hard drive) but the reason for not supporting Aero Glass did bug me. I was told I needed a graphics card that had 128 MB of dedicated RAM (which I don't have) or uses shared Memory. Your current graphics card has 96.00 MB of dedicated memory. The problem here is my computer does have 128 MB of shared memory! At least it is suppose to! I looked on the specifications of my tablet to see if my mind maybe had read things wrong when I purchased it, but I was right my Lenovo X41 Tablet PC is suppose to have 128 MB of shared video memory. Of course it does say up to 128 MB...I don't know what that means but it sounds sketchy to me. I checked on the display properties and once again 96 MB of video memory was shown. I know my Tablet PC won't ever run at Aero Glass but it should still be displaying 128 MB I think. I remember readying somewhere on Tablet PC Buzz about this issue so I plan to do a bit more digging on that.
Anyways when it was all said and done the Advisor presented to me that Windows Vista Ultimate would be the best version for me. (probably because I selected all the features in the first step) If you're interested to see if your Tablet PC, notebook or desktop may be able to run Vista its a worthy download. It's still crude though as it tells you many drivers are not supported yet but I am sure this will all change as manufactures will most likely release updates when Vista finally arrives.
posted by Jason Dorko at 3:03 PM
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I was wondering if you ever figured out why the X41 Tablets show 96MB of shared memory in use. I have the same issue, and IBM tech support wasn't able to explain why I have 96MB shared when I should have 128. There don't seem to be any bios settings I can change to get up to the full 128 either.
In any case, I would like to run Aero at some point, and I would hope that Vista could use some of my 1.5GB of RAM and my CPU to assist with their 3D rendering needs.
I never did quite figure it out but I did update the driver and it now tells me I have 672 MB of maximum graphics memory. It's kind of funny if you think about it...but I think Intel will have to release a driver update when Vista hits the stores. I did try running Aero and Vista on my X41 about a week ago but it did not work and the X41 loaded up so much slower that I went to my backup. It feels like I am looking at Windows 95 or something after having Vista on the Tablet PC and the handwriting is so much better I was seriously considering maybe upgrading but I just like my system to run a bit faster than it did with Vista. Maybe some driver updates will solve this but for now I'll stick with Microsoft Windows 2005 Tablet PC edition. Let me know if you any more success than me!
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