Aero will run fine
April 7, 2006For all to see: a video and screenshot proving to the world that Aero will run fine on even pre-DirectX9 videocards, in this case, my Ati Radeon 9000 128MB RAM. The computer used for this video only has 512MB of RAM (old and slow pc-133 even), and an Athlon XP 1600+ processor.
However, in order to bypass Vista’s DX9 compatibility check of the videocard it runs on, you need to do some minor registry tweaking. Since I’m not sure about the legality of that stuff, fire up Google to find which tweaks.
One caveat: even though window borders were transparent during these tests, they did not sport the blurr effect. The fact that this effect seems to have been disabled might mean that less strain was imposed on the crappy videocard. Bear that in mind.
I’m putting this video up as proof for each and every one to see that FUD has been making its rounds around the internet against Microsoft, instead of by Microsoft ;). Since I hate false information… If you would like to share your videos of Vista running on ‘older’ hardware, let me know, and I’ll add your videos to this page. Bear in mind that I cannot host all the videos, since my space is limited, so host them somewhere yourself.
What are the registry hacks and what driver did you use for the video card… I have the same hardware in my laptop and never got the effects to work.
Comment by Keith — April 7, 2006 @ 5:04 pm
With this Video you have proven that on a Clean installation of Vista, running a few explorer windows and firefox simulatanious works reasonably well.
How does Vista work after a month, when you’ve installed all sorts of software and are working with Photoshop & Dreamweaver, while browsing the web and chatting with MSN Messenger.
Seriously, the stuff you just showed… Explorer windows, Firefox… That would work on a machine running Windows XP with 128MB RAM. But hardly anyone would say XP runs fine on 128MB RAM.
You proved nothing.
Comment by Richard Stellingwerff — April 7, 2006 @ 5:35 pm
Thom wanted to show how Aero is working fine, not the applications themselves. Aero won’t be slow after 6 months, while the system might.
And besides, Linux doesn’t really run well on 128 MB either. It needs 256 MBs as a minimum. I have a bare bones Arch Linux installation on my 128 MB RAM laptop (maxed out), and it crawls like hell, because the swap kicks in all the time. BeOS flies on the same laptop.
Comment by Eugenia — April 7, 2006 @ 5:44 pm
And hopefully when Vista gets released nLite will be available for it and so it will be running just as fast as my streamlined uber XP setup. I dont remember but I think I am coming upon 6 months of that install and I have yet to see any slowdowns despite installing and uninstalling a bazillion bits of software.
Comment by Surya De — April 7, 2006 @ 8:25 pm
The reason you don’t get blurry windows borders is that the blur itself is done with a pixel shader — a programmable stored procedure that lives on the graphics card.
It would be interesting to see if you system generates GDI errors while executing. In xp these are suppresed but appear in the system monitoring snappin for the mmc .
Comment by KCorax — May 23, 2006 @ 5:29 pm
Blur doesnt work because it uses DX9 shaders to do it. I tried Vista on my Dell Laptop (Inspiron 5150 2.8GHz @ 1.6GHz, 512MB PC2700 DDR RAM, GeForce FX Go5200) and blur worked flawlessly (albeit a little slow because drivers for the FX Go series are severely gimped… say 1/2 clock speeds and no overclocking >.
Comment by Calvin — September 12, 2007 @ 7:02 am