vista ultimate on AAO works superb

I would be interested to know if Vista exhibits a persistent problem of "losing" USB configurations as well as any CD/DVD you might have connected. I have been running Vista on a Gateway laptop since April of 2007 and Vista keeps losing the USB configurations of the various accessories that I use (i.e. external hd, USB drivers, blue tooth, Blackberry, Pocket PC, etc.). It also continually loses the DVD drive - sometimes right in the middle of use! This has been an ongoing problem with Vista (do a search on Google). A friend of mine just bought a Toshiba laptop and is already having these issues.

Since the One doesn't have a built in CD/DVD drive, it might be a moot point, but the USB configurations might be something you will want to look out for. Please report if you notice any of these issues.

Thanks.

 

did anyone get the webcam to work mine shows up in device manager but i dont know how to get it to start. Also what touchpad driver are you using? Im using the one from synaptic website and its not as good as the xp one. How do you get the FN buttons to work only the brightness works for me

 

My first full battery-drain test yielded 2 hrs 56 minutes of "real world" usage on the included 3-cell battery. (Remember that my A150 has been upgraded with a 250 gig WD hard drive and has 1.5 gigs of RAM.) I have my unit set to hibernate when it reaches 5% power remaining, and I ran it from a full battery right down to that point.

Here is how I set up the unit.
* Set unit to "Power saver" mode in the power options
* Screen set to 50% brightness
* Wifi enabled and connected to home router

I used the unit as I typically would.
* Had Outlook 2007 running and connected to my hosted Exchange service
* Had Firefox 3.01 open with 8-12 tabs in my typical browsing pattern
* Had Skype 3.8 open, with two text chats going most of that time
* Used Microsoft Word and Excel 2007 to create and edit documents
* Used Microsoft OneNote 2007 to make some notes on an existing project
* Watched one episode of Get Smart in Vista Media Center
* Played a few games of spider solitaire

The system ran well, even in power save mode. Video wasn't quite as smooth as when running in "Balanced" or "High performance" modes, so I suspect the GPU is underclocked in "Power save" mode. However, video was still perfectly watchable in both full-screen and windowed configurations.

For reference, Vista reports about 2 hrs 7 min of battery life when running in "Balanced" mode, and about 1 hr 44 min of battery life in "High performance" mode. "Power save" mode does seem to increase battery life quite a bit, and at minimal performance costs.

For those curious about media streaming around the house, here's a bit more info about my set-up. I streamed that Get Smart episode from the season one DVD, which is ripped as a VIDEO_TS folder and stored on our Windows Home Server in the office. It, in turn, communicates with MyMovies, hosted on our HTPC in the living room. We have Cat 5e in the walls, so our wired network is all gigabit, but our wireless is still running G.

Our entire DVD collection is stored in this manner, and it works quite well with Vista on the AA1. Without media streaming, I suspect 3+ hours of battery life is possible under Vista. With wifi disabled, this could be even longer. My tests are for my typical usage pattern, and I am thrilled with the results! I hope others have found this information helpful.

 

Tom's hardware has reported before that adding more RAM saves more power..

 

Indeed it does, as it reduces swap activity to the hard disk. Disabling your swap file will also result in some power savings, though I wouldn't recommend this with less than 2 gigs in Vista. I was able to get nearly three hours of "real world" usage with the swap file intact, so I don't feel the need to disable it on this machine.

 

Yup!
I never disable swap, because I am scared that one day, it is gonna gimme error messages. that happened to my virtual machine.

 

I am the only one having problems with my webcam on vista ultimate?

 

I am going to add vista today on my upgraded one 1.5GB RAM, 320GB HD.

Are people who have been succesful with vista installing a lite version or regular ultimate??

THX

 

thx for the info!!!! just received my aa1 (xph, 1gb, 120gb, 6cell battery), love it so far, but xp just bugs me, good to see that vista runs great. Gonna upgrade mine to 1.5gb and give vista a go.

Did you use a usb optical drive or copy a vista image to a big thumbdrive for the install?

 

I installed vista last night Via a usb stick, took about 15 mins :shock: and runs fine on my A150L (1Gb ram, I have a another stick sat waiting to be put in) Had a lot of problems with the dirvers at first (especially LAN/WLan) untill I installed SP1 so beware of older Dvd's/Copys.

all in all its stable now, still need to twaek it though as the battery life is shown as 2:05 at 99% in power saving mode

Performance index doenst seem to be working correctly for "Gaming Graphics" as it just shows a 1.0 :/ what gfx drivers are you guys using?

I am however getting a 5,3 from the hard drive which is better than some desktop HDD's which kind of shocked me.

 

I installed the full version of Vista Ultimate. Without the space constraints of a tiny SSD, I don't see the need for vLite or TinyVista. Performance isn't an issue for me using the full version.

I used an external optical drive for installation.

 

Ok i just DL'd the drivers for the Gigabyte M912 (Same chipset) and now have no problems with the GFX either! Aero etc all works fine and i now have a gfx rating of 4.1 and a gaming gfx rating of 2.7 :lol:

 

Ptherwise you can use Intel's own driver, should be the most suited (no performance gain though).

 

No you are not. Exact same problem here with Vista Home Basic as well.

 

Just a quick obvious point: You can install from a USB HDD just as easily (and faster than) a USB flash drive. See my informal HOWTO at http://jblarg.blogspot.com/2008/08/installing-windows-vista-or-windows.html

 

In my understanding a high speed USB flash drive is faster than a standard USB HDD.

I just installed Vista and it works great. I hated going back to XP and after reading others' success I tried it out.

I bought my AA0 150 Monday for $250+tax after a Best Buy $100 off any laptop coupon - AMAZING deal for this little powerhouse. I had low expectations for its power, but it runs beautifully.

Here's a pointer - if you're not using that SD card on the left side for anything (since there's an SD card reader + on the right) you can use that as a readyboost card. I have a 4 gig SDHC Sandisk Extreme III (~20MB/s) in there, and the max recommended is 2.5x your ram (so 4GB is a teensie bit much for 1.5GB ram). I think this will do wonders actually, and I wouldn't have used that slot really anyway. Has anyone else done this?

I plan on doing the bluetooth upgrade and perhaps a GPS mod if I can find info on a good card with a strong signal.

Very happy

PS cytech, it's funny how your screenshot is larger than my screen. Usually it's the other way around eh? Haha

 

yep im running a 2Gb sandisk III in that slot for ready boost as well.

not sure what happened with the screenshot :shock: think it got eaten by my work pc lol


I upgraded to 1.5gb ram last night as well, seems to fly...infact for "normal" usage (surfing, skype scripting etc.) its not really much slower than my desktop :lol:


I also tried out my Terratec T² USB digital TV reciever as well and it works fine, picture is smooth at full screen, no buffering/freezing etc.

Really didnt think this little baby would handle vista as well as it does

 

yep, my vista install runs like a dream after a few updates

 

In general, a USB HDD is going to be faster than most/all USB flash drives. USB flash drives usually have faster seek times, ReadyBoost takes advantage of this fact, but HDDs lay waste to them on read/write operations.

 

did installing vista wipe out the xp restore partion?