My W3j Vista Experience...

It's not good news i'm afraid

Ok after nearly killing my lovely notebook i thought i'd share my experiences so far, so others can avoid my mistakes.

**** think of this as a guide of exactly what NOT to do... ****

ok, I started with a factory XP image from the recovery partition and flattened my notebook so there was nothing to cause disruption with the vista install. I burned a DVD of RC1 5600 and popped the disc in with xp running and everything auto-ran ok, the menu system couldn't be simpler and before you know it vista was copying over to my freshly partitioned d: . (Smooth sailing so far...)

Things took a nasty turn when the install had copied over and decompressed the vista image onto the machine. The installer prompted me to reboot the notebook which i duly did...

The notebook then decided to take a serious disliking to vista and it's tinkerings with my drive, basically the notebook would no longer boot into windows, or off the Vista disc. My understanding is that Vista had modified the boot sector of the drive, leaving the computer in an endless reboot loop, where it would POST, try to boot of the HDD then instantly black screen and reboot. not so cool

After some flailing in the dark formatting the vista partition; trying to boot off an XP disc and running FIXBOOT and FIXMBR, which had no effect, i started to worry a little... I then decided to have a browse online to see if anyone had been in a similar situation ( something I now agree should have been done a LOT earlier), and discovered that Vista had replaced the standard XP and 2K bootloader "NTLDR" with a new and ultimately incompatible bootloader.

This had left the HDD in the notebook unbootable and with the vista bootloader completely impervious to formatting i was stumped for some time as to how to remedy the situation. After further reading (most suggestions that i'd read suggested booting from the Vista disc and then running various command line programs) I found reference to a program on the vista disc called "Bootsect.exe" it can be found in the "Boot" folder of the RC1 DVD. this command line program can, with the correct switches, restore your drive to a condition where it will again use the XP friendly NTLDR format. The only problem was, even though it was a command line application, it couldn't be run under a DOS prompt.

This meant the only option was to remove the disc drive from my notebook and using an external caddy to allow my trusty desktop to run the Bootsect program on the blighted drive and purge the evil Vista curse from my laptop the switch i used was:

bootsect /nt52 d: /force

After replacing the drive back into the W3, it booted from the drive and merrily informed me that my boot.ini couldn't be found and then hung (Awesome, i can fix this with Fixboot from my XP disc i thought )
and I was right!! after several false starts i'd finally resurrected my lappy

Ok that's it, that's what i put my W3 through, and I URGE you not to do the same. The best way to avoid this. wait for Asus to release a bios which is compatible with Vista, which shouldn't take long ( X finger's crossed X )

Until then i suggest you enjoy XP on your W3j as it's more than adequate in the mean time.

Thanks for reading, sorry for uber long post

 

I bet that booting from a DOS disk and doing a fdisk /mbr would have taken care of things.

 

Yeah, same thing happened to the WinME machines when XP was released..... they "worked", but didn't function properly till the bios was updated. Don't discount Vista, it's a great OS, but till a bios update is made (which it certainly will be), and the final tweaks are made to the OS, I think "problems" are all there are to talk about....... and that's good, in a way... as long as you report it.

 

Sorry to hear that dude..I have the A8Js with Merom CPU, Asus saying that this machine is VISTA capable, as anyone try to install vista on this machine?
I am about to install RC2, but before that with Brigand21 bad experience i would like to know if its working...

 

I just wanted to let you know that Ries found a hack/solution to get Vista running on AWJ.

~ Brett

 

Ok, Update time!

I've bitten the bullet and followed the above mentioned hack to get Vista onto my W3J, I followed the instructions to the letter and everything worked as it should! Happy days

Things i've found useful so far, the Audio driver from Asus' website does indeed fix the audio issue on the notebook ( on initial install vista picks up the audio device incorrectly ) using device manager to remove the HD audio device that Vista is imagining to exist and refering the driver installer to the freshly unzipped Audio driver filename "AUDIO_XP_060426.zip" worked out fine.

So far i still haven't got bluetooth working, tried installing the bluetooth drivers from the Asus website, Vista reports there is a known issue with these. i am able to run the Diagnostics on the adapter though and it picking up the MASC addresses of various phones in the office so i'd imagine it's not a fundamental incompatibility.

Also a few ominous unknown devices are listed under Dev. Manager i guess i'll find out what these are in due time. So far, i'm enjoying Vista though, it looks very slick and as yet i've had no performance issues.

 

Have you gotten the hotkeys working on the w3j? That was the main reason why i turned back to xp

 

'Fraid not, the hotkeys aren't that important to me though, they're nice, but i can happily live without them, and the left hand buttons do seem to work with Media player already (shame i hate WMP!). The majority of the right hand buttons are out of action though. the Bluetooth button does turn the light on and off and you hear the standard Usb Connect/Disconnect noise but that's about it.

 

I find it hard to understand why people get so excited about installing a new OS right away. It IS a cool thing, and Vista looks cool, but every MS OS took 1+ years to get stable for the majority of people.

If you're into tinkering its fine, but if you intend to perform work, play games, etc... I suggest waiting a while or until they have a major service pack release. Glad you got your system running again though!