Windows Vista on an Old Notebook
30 12 2007
The negative publicity around Windows Vista has been relentless since its debut in November 2006. It’s been called slow, incompatible, a resource hog, and most recently featured in CNet’s “Top ten terrible tech products” of all time. So much has it been maligned, that even I, a self-professed technophile and early adopter have held off for more than 12 months before even giving it a look. Admittedly, I own a four-year-old notebook, about the worst possible computer to upgrade to Windows Vista. Every reviewer would scream danger and warn of headaches with proprietary drivers and the like. To me it smelled of a challenge. So I bade farewell to XP and booted up Vista’s install DVD on my trusty old Acer TravelMate 370. The results, I have to say, have been mixed.
Contents
Hardware
Before I continue, allow me to give you a run down of the hardware I used for this experiment. The Acer TravelMate 370 is a first-generation Centrino and has:
- Pentium M 1.4 GHz
- 512 MB DDR RAM
- 35 GB hard disk
- Intel integrated graphics (82855 GM/GME) and sound (AC’97)
Networking:
- 802.11b wireless adapter (Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 3B Mini PCI)
- Realtek NIC
Other onboard devices:
- SD card reader (Ricoh)
- Synaptics touchpad
- Software buttons to control WiFi and 5 user-programmable shortcut keys
- Agere AC’97 modem
One of the main concerns (and biggest cause of anguish) with Windows Vista is compatibility with hardware. Following its release, many vendors struggled to release compatible device drivers. Because notebooks have unusual onboard devices and are rarely upgraded, there are typically no Vista drivers for pre-Vista notebooks. This was my number one concern when planning this upgrade.
The second concern was whether the CPU and memory would be adequate for the task. Microsoft claims minimum requirements of an 800 MHz processor and 512 MB of memory, but recommends at least 1 GHz. My Pentium M 1.4 was claimed to compete with Pentium 4’s of its time clocking over 2.0 GHz, and should have been fast enough to handle Vista more than adequately. The greater concern was the paltry 512 MB, which was actually 496 MB after 16 MB was taken out for video. Almost all reviews claim that Microsoft’s minimum memory requirements are unrealistic, and with anything less than 1 GB Vista borders on unusable. I was concerned, but not convinced. After all, budget laptops sell today with as little as 512 MB. Surely these machines would not be rolling off the factory floor if they were unusable, right?
Installation
Preparation
Fearing my notebook would be crippled and driverless after the installation, my first port of call was Acer. After much trawling around all of Acer’s regional support sites, I located the XP drivers for the TravelMate 370’s onboard hardware. The Australasian site no longer listed my model, but eventually I followed a convoluted series of clicks to the European site, here: http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/tm_370.html. I downloaded all of these and put them in a safe a place. If I could not locate Vista drivers, these would be my last desperate resort.
Point of No Return
Despite feelings of impending doom, the installation went very smoothly indeed. I opted for a clean install on a separate partition, to allow me to make comparisons with my previous Windows XP installation. I also elected to install Windows Vista Ultimate, to give my hardware the most to deal with.
From the moment I booted the installation DVD, it took approximately 30 minutes to extract the image onto my hard drive. Configuration of language settings and the like, as well as some more disk crunching, took another 30 minutes. All in all, 1 hour later I was at a fully functioning Vista desktop. This was much the same as what an installation of Windows XP typically takes, but I was impressed at how little user input was required. For the most part, it was an entirely unattended install.
The installation clocked in at around 7 GB, which, although a sizeable chunk of my 35 GB drive, wasn’t more than I could manage.
Driver Troubles
As anticipated, much of the notebook’s hardware did not work straight off the cuff. Bringing up Device Manager (click Start, type “dev”) revealed that the following devices did not have drivers installed:
- Wireless adapter
- Card reader
- Modem
Additionally, the Synaptics touchpad only partially worked, with the horizontal and vertical scroll features no longer functioning.
I must admit, at this point my heart sank a little. Although I had expected this outcome, I was secretly hoping I would somehow be fortunate.
Wireless adapter
The most critical of the three non-functioning devices, and the only true deal-breaker, was the wireless adapter. If I could not get this to work, the Vista experiment would be dead before it had really begun.
I was a little hesitant to jump straight to Acer’s Windows XP drivers for such a critical component, so I rebooted into XP to regain Internet access. Thanks to Device Manager I was armed with the name of my wireless adapter, so finding it on Intel’s website was a cinch. Lo and behold, there was a Vista driver at:
Booting back into Vista, it took less than 5 minutes to run the driver setup program, complete the installation, and be connected to my home WiFi network. I was thrilled! The most risky part of the upgrade was over, and it was now time to fiddle with the lesser devices.
Or so I thought.
After rebooting, I noticed that the wireless light on my notebook was no longer glowing a reassuring orange. In my childish naivety, I pressed the wireless software button. Nothing. I’d figured as much, as the software buttons usually need some software to talk to. “If only my TravelMate had a proper on-off switch”, I swore! I hunted through Device Manager, the Mobility Centre and every corner of Control Panel. I did find a check box in Device Manager to turn the wireless radio OFF, but there was no option to turn the bloody thing ON!
I then began my humbling crawl back to those Acer drivers I had downloaded previously. Firstly, I installed Acer Notebook Manager, remembering that in XP this had settings to control the wireless adapter. Unfortunately, this did not go so smoothly. Vista warned me that this software may not be compatible. I ignored the warning and pushed on. The install only half worked, and Notebook Manager just wouldn’t go into the system tray as it should. When I eventually managed to open it, clicking any options caused a program crash. Dead end.
Lesson #1 – Acer Notebook Manager doesn’t work in Vista. Don’t even bother. The same can probably be said for all low-level notebook applications that fiddle with the guts of your system.
The next approach was installing Launch Manager. This is the program that controls the software buttons and hopefully would let me turn the wireless on. Again, Vista warned about potential incompatibility, but this time everything seemed to work. Just like in XP, Launch Manager placed its icon in the system tray. Unfortunately, I soon realized that it had not fully installed. The programmable soft-keys worked, but the wireless button did not. Peeking in its install folder, I discovered that the Wbutton.exe, the wireless component of Launch Manager, had not been installed. At this point, out of utter desperation, I copied the entire contents of the installation folder from my Windows XP partition (which included Wbutton.exe) into (and overwriting) the installation folder on the Vista partition (C:\Program Files\Launch Manager).
The heavens smiled down on me that day and all of a sudden Launch Manager began behaving exactly as it did on XP. Pressing the wireless soft-key caused the orange light to come on. When even the on-screen-display worked by telling me “Wireless Enabled”, I almost cried.
Lesson #2 – Make copies of the XP installation folder for any notebook programs (such as soft-key and on-screen-display utilities) in case the installation breaks on Vista. If you’re lucky, it may just work.
I couldn’t believe such a hack worked, but in my case it did. I now have fully functioning soft-keys and a wireless button that actually works.
Card reader
For the Ricoh card reader, I decided to first try searching the net for a Vista driver. When I came up with nothing, I tried the XP driver I’d downloaded from Acer Europe. To my amazement, everything seemed to work flawlessly, and pretty soon my SD card was mounted and I was able to see its contents. Alas, Vista continued churning away while I was revelling in my success, and suddenly the mounted volume disappeared, only to be replaced by an icon for “Removable Disk”. Attempting to open it yielded “Access Denied”. Device Manager now reported that the Microsoft WPD File System Volume Driver was in an error state, and that the “Device cannot start”.
I tried numerous system restores, and attempted installing this driver in every way I knew how. I searched the web and found an abundance of similar sob stories. It appears that even notebooks purchased with Vista pre-installed are prone to this problem.
The closest I have come to a functioning card reader is one that will mount the card only once. If I eject the card, I need to reboot before it will mount again. This was achieved by reinstalling the XP drivers but with the internet connection disabled. Presumably, whatever Vista downloaded the first time around from Windows Update didn’t play along.
As yet, I have no solution for this. My card reader only barely works.
Modem
After hours of frustration with the wireless adapter and card reader, I expected the worst. I decided to try letting Vista sort this out automatically, so I right-clicked the modem in Device Manager and selected Update Driver Software. Miraculously, Vista found the right driver, downloaded it, and installed it. Compared to the other two horror stories, the modem installation couldn’t have been easier.
Touchpad
After the install, the touchpad was recognised as a PS/2 mouse and all basic functions (i.e. moving and clicking) worked. The scroll-wheel and other advanced features were not available. I tried locating Vista-specific drivers from Synaptics, but at the time of writing their site was undergoing maintenance:
http://www.synaptics.com/support/drive.cfm
I managed to locate a driver at:
Unfortunately, this was not the end of the story. With the Synaptics driver loaded, I began experiencing intermittent cursor freezes. These would only last a few seconds but were frequent enough to be infuriating (every 30 seconds or so). Uninstalling the driver resolved the freezing problem, but left me without scrolling.
Summary of Driver Troubles
Most of the main devices on the TravelMate 370 worked under Windows Vista after a little bit of hard yakka. The display adapter and sound card worked out of the box, and the modem drivers were located automatically. Wireless worked as well as under Windows XP, but took a little convincing. The touchpad drivers were not entirely compatible, and I’ve elected to leave them out of the equation. That said, aside from scrolling, the touchpad works as before. The only device that just would not play along was the Ricoh card reader. From discussions on the Web, this is known issue and does not only affect old notebooks. As such, it may be rectified in a future Windows update.
Performance
Overall Usability
After getting the hardware working as best as I could, it was time to actually start using Vista. My first impression was that it wasn’t all that slow all. In fact, once up and running, it seemed just as snappy as XP on the same machine. That said, actually getting up and running was quite a hurdle and I was less than impressed with boot up and shut down times (see below).
I then decided to install a few major applications and give the installation a real-world run in. In went Office Ultimate 2007, Acrobat Reader, Firefox 2.0, AVG Free Edition and Nokia PC Suite. Compatibility wasn’t an issue here, and given that Vista has been around for a year now, this was expected. I used Vista as my main operating system for almost two weeks, and found it to be pleasantly useable. Many will scoff and tell you that with such meagre specs multitasking would be out of the question. I had a number of documents and spreadsheets open, alongside Firefox and a few folders, and noticed very little slowdown. Switching between applications was a little slower than XP, but not enough to cause headache. The biggest performance hit, as expected, came with installing the anti-virus package. Even this though, wasn’t a show stopper.
In fact, I was so impressed with Vista’s performance (once booted), that I entertained the thought of wiping my XP partition altogether, to free up some space. Booting back into XP was the worst thing I could have done for my impressions of Vista. As enamoured as I had become with the new Windows, there was no denying that XP (even my crusty 2-year-old installation) was substantially quicker and easier on the system. There was no waiting. Windows flung open. I barely heard a peep from the hard disk.
So, there you have it. Vista works surprising well on an old machine, just don’t go back to XP to compare.
Memory
The first of my concerns was how Vista was going to cope with the 512 MB of memory my notebook had. This too was pleasantly surprising. Most of the time Task Manager reported between 350 and 380 MB used, leaving 100 MB or so to play with. At times, this dipped as low as 270 MB. Of course, 100 MB isn’t a lot to play with, but for running simple tasks it probably wouldn’t require an immediate RAM upgrade. For comparison, my old (but relatively lean) Windows XP installation idled in the low 300s, not infinitely more frugal than Vista.
I was most concerned with how the 512 MB of memory would cope with multitasking, especially knowing that Office 2007 was quite taxing. I opened up a complex Word document, three Excel spreadsheets, a PDF, as well as a number of Firefox tabs. Not only was there not much noticeable slowdown, memory usage stayed around 410 MB. Admittedly, the page file was always sitting around the 500 MB mark and there was a fair bit more hard disk crunching than I was used to.
Vista’s memory requirements are something that everyone seems to have an opinion on. PCSTATS have an excellent article comparing various memory size configurations. There appears to be a definite performance benefit in upgrading from 512 MB to 1 GB, particularly in office productivity tests such as Business Winstone. Therefore, it is possible that the overall snappiness that I subjectively noted to be lacking when compared to XP would be readily fixed with an inexpensive RAM upgrade.
Boot Up and Shutdown Times
Even without a stopwatch in hand, it was easy to recognise that Vista took longer to start up and power down than XP. Compared to XP, it seemed to take forever before the hard disk stopped crunching after a cold start. Even recovery from hibernation seemed to take longer than I was used to. Although the desktop, cursor and start menu were available quite quickly, this was a trick. Many of the resident programs continued to load for the first few minutes, and system responsiveness during this time was quite disappointing. Even opening a folder for example, could take 30 seconds or more.
I decided to put both Vista and XP to the test, by timing the time it took for the machine to wake up and go to bed from each of the three possible methods available (cold boot and shutdown, hibernate and standby). For each method, I measured the time on three occasions and took an average. I did not control what processes were running, but rather used the system as I normally would.
The results proved quite disappointing for Vista. The most significant discrepancy was in the cold boot and shutdown times, with Vista taking approximately 40 seconds longer to both start up and shut down. Additionally, I found the cold start up time the most difficult to measure, as the machine became responsive (albeit only just) well before the entire boot process was complete. I decided to pick an arbitrary cut off at the moment all of the system tray icons had appeared. In the case of XP, this coincided fairly well with the end of disk activity. With Vista, disk activity continued for at least another minute beyond this point. Furthermore, full network connectivity didn’t occur until a good two minutes after the system tray icons had finished loading. As such, Vista’s already poor result for cold boot is an underestimation of the true time for the system to become useable (closer to 3 minutes).
With the exception of the time to go into hibernation (38 sec in Vista, 10 sec in XP), all other boot and shutdown times were similar. Particularly, there was little difference in the time to go into and come out of standby.
In light of these results, it is not surprising that even Microsoft is pushing for standby to be the default state for an unused computer. On a notebook, it may be preferable to use hibernate as, unlike standby, it consumes no power. Certainly no one should have to put themselves through the torture of cold booting and shutting down a Vista PC on a regular basis.
Conclusions
Installing Windows Vista on an old notebook is not a job for the faint of heart. I encountered many problems along the road, and spent countless hours trying to get basic functions to work as they should. The good news is that, given perseverance, most devices will eventually come to the party. I could not, for the life of me, get the Ricoh card reader to work flawlessly, and I had to go without advanced touchpad features like scrolling and click lock.
Performance is definitely inferior running Vista on the same hardware as XP. The most significant difference is in boot up times, which can take two to three minutes (versus less than one minute on XP). Once up and running, the operating system is pleasantly useable, however it is subjectively less snappy than its predecessor. This is possibly due to my notebook having only 512 MB of memory, and an upgrade here may well make all the difference. All in all, performance was better than I expected and this alone would not be a reason to not upgrade.
Many people talk about hardware and software compatibility issues, and aside from the notebook’s built-in devices, I struck a few problems here also. My father’s 3-megapixel Pentax digital camera was not recognised, and I couldn’t find Vista drivers online. Likewise, my old 3Com Bluetooth PCMCIA card did not have drivers and could not be coaxed into working. Both of these devices are rather prehistoric, but both are examples of where Vista, if it were my main OS, would cause anguish.
In the end, I think I will hold off on Vista for a little while longer. To make it less laborious, I would need to invest in more RAM ($50) and a bigger hard disk ($150). I would need to also purchase a new Bluetooth adapter ($20). Combined with the cost of Vista Home Premium OEM ($150), I would be looking at over $300 before my notebook was running as it did under XP. Only, it would still take three times as long to boot, twice as long to shut down, have no card reader and a touchpad that only just works. Given that I can purchase a brand new Vista-preloaded notebook for under $1,000, I cannot justify the cost.
Considering that Windows XP Service Pack 3 is just around the corner, I’d say there’s plenty of life left in the old girl yet.
