Vista Capable Explained

MAIN THING IS THE VIEO CARD WITH WDDM

I have a Dell Deminsion 8400 and Vista Aero works great! I do not know what video card I have... but it was whatever came on that system. There was no tweaking needed for Aero to run. When I upgraded, everything worked except thr following:
Dell AIO Printer (VERY frustrating)
And my ATI Control panel - (But I am still able to use windows to adjust all my display properties).

With an XPS I think you should be fine. Marekting chnages and probably Vista capapble was all they knew at the time you purchased. I am about to but an E1705 that is clearly above the specs called for with Vista but I have some programs that will need updating, just as I did with XP. (I've hated Roxio ever since!!)

The only way you're going to know for sure is if you run Vista on the hardware.

If you have the machine, I'd suggest downloading the Vista RC2 public trial to see how it runs on your machine. This is the best approximation of what Vista will be like that is currently available.

I purchased a Latitude D620 last week explicitly so that I could run Vista w/ Aero on it. According to Dell's site, my config should be Vista Premium Ready (NVidia Quadro NVS 110M + 2 GB system RAM) but the Aero UI is pretty slow / jerky / laggy most of the time. Sometimes it's really smooth, like it should be. I'm thinking that there's something not configured quite right in the video card's driver, but this means I have to wait for someone to fix it before Vista will run as it should. I have no idea how long I'll have to wait for that to happen, and I'm almost certain nobody (i.e. Dell) will care until Vista is actually shipping (and even then they may not fix the problem and just blame it on MS or NVidia). This is not something I want to have to deal with, so I'm thinking at this point that I'll return the machine and either look elsewhere or wait until Vista ships and has a known level of support on the D620.

Anyway, the point of my story: even if Dell claims Vista Premium should run OK, you're not going to know for sure unless you try it yourself.

So, you are going to return a machine because Beta software will not run on it? That's a little drastic. How much memory is on the card? My guess it is nothing more than a driver issue, so go the manufacturers site and see what they have.

jmwills:

I'm not entirely sure if I want to return it or not just yet.

There are also problems with the top of the screen on the notebook that show up on dark images: a curtain-like effect of ligher / darker spots each about the size of a dime that repeat across the screen. So I'd like to have that addressed anyway if I keep the notebook.

The vid card has 64 MB onboard and can make use of up to 256 MB shared system memory.

As for beta drivers -- I've already been to NVidia's site and the driver package they provide doesn't officially support laptop video cards. You can hack it to make it work (which I have) but that driver has issues with resuming from suspend and still doesn't help with the issues in Aero.

The thing is, it's obvious that Dell hasn't tested the D620 with Vista and is just going by Microsoft's recommendations. Since I'm still in the 21-day return period, I'm worried that if I don't act now I may be stuck with a machine that doesn't actually run Vista very well.

For Vista to be fully operatioanl in Aero, a mnimum of 128 mb of RAM dedicated to the video card is necessary. No amount of shared memory will do. Even my GeForce 5200 with 64mb dedicated RAM will not run Aero.