After having my shiny new hard-drive hooked up today, I decided that I’d go crazy and try out Windows Vista, what with all the hype. I know this is somewhat hypocritical of me, after writing on Sayonara’s blog that I would never do such a thing, but I wanted to know what performance would be like under my one-year-old laptop.

Boy, was I in for a shock.

My laptop is a Dell Latitude D610 (now discontinued). It’s not a beast, but it does what I want and I don’t expect too much from it. It contains an Intel i915GM graphics card, which is part of the GMA 900 series. Again, not brilliant, but it works. In fact, it’s pretty good when it comes to things like Beryl under Ubuntu; very smooth indeed.

So, imagine my surprise after having spent about a half-hour installing Vista to find out that its one redeeming feature, the shiny GUI interface dubbed Aero, wasn’t enabled. I was a little surprised, since it worked fairly well under the release candidates.

After playing around with various registry settings and having no effect, I found this, and this.

Let me give a short summary. Aero will only ever work with the retail version of Vista if you have WDDM drivers for your graphics card. WDDM is a standard for graphics cards dictated by Microsoft, and unless cards meet a certain minimum requirement, they are not WDDM-compatible and any drivers made will not be WDDM-certified.

The Intel i915GM meets all but one requirement. From what I can see, it’s not a critical requirement - it certainly worked well under the release candidates! But as such, Intel are not going to make drivers for them on the grounds of recent staff layoffs and the lack of WDDM certification. So you will never be able to use your GMA 900 graphics card with Aero. Ever.

Furthermore, the graphics card is listed as Vista Ready. Many people thought that this meant it was also Aero ready: big mistake. Your card is not “ready” for Aero (whatever the hell that means) unless it is Vista Premium Ready. Wow. How could I possibly have made such a stupid mistake? Just like the insane DRM aspect of Vista, this stinks.

On top of all that, here’s Intel’s lovely FAQ entry:

With these identified limitations, the 915/GMA900-based graphics system would not have met the performance requirements for Aero desktop composition support under Vista. This ultimately led to the decision to begin WDDM support with the Intel 945 Express chipset products, as Intel addressed these hardware limitations with the desktop and mobile Intel 945 Express chipset families.

To provide the best performance and user experience with Windows Vista on Intel 915/GMA900 platforms, Intel will support Windows Vista on 915/GMA900 with the drivers based on the XP driver model.

You know what - if I want to have my system perform like treacle but look great, then that’s my decision, not yours. For a company that’s effectively mislead at least 5,000 people according to the petition, they sure could have offered a better FAQ entry than that crap.

Given that WDDM drivers are available for the GMA 950 series (which is so close to the GMA 900 as to be laughable) and the fact the GMA 900 is extremely popular, I’ll quite happily call bullshit on the we haven’t got enough manpower excuse. Well, I’ll tell you something. I’m not buying Intel products again unless I can avoid it. If they choose to treat their customers as a bunch of ignorant morons, then I simply won’t use their hardware.

This is me signing off from Windows Vista, which is about to be removed, permanently, from my laptop.

1:16 pm | Posted in Hardware, Ranting