A free Ferrari from Microsoft

Laughing Squid received a Ferrari 1000 from Microsoft for testing and blogging.
Hope the laptop works. I was able to source (with excellent support from AMD) 3 of these beauties to show off at our Virtualization Summits early next year. Unfortunately all 3 did not work with Vista. I had constant system hangs and never got a pre-RTM or RTM version of Vista to work. Oh, and there were major driver issues. Even though the systems had a sticker “Vista Capable” or so, only a few drivers came out of the box with Vista. Other drivers – for XP – downloaded from the Acer website only caused more trouble. Namely the Bluetooth and the camera driver. Neither 32–bit nor 64–bit Vista worked and all systems failed memory diagnostics of all sorts.

With all that trouble I returned the systems to the vendor. After 2 weeks or so I was told – upon request – that (according to Acer) these systems have issues with Vista and Acer could not give an ETA for an update.

This was back in November. I still have not heard back (neither from Acer nor from our vendor!) but Laughing Squid’s post sounds promising. I hope the Edelman folks checked Vista compatibility before sending out the systems. We’ve had already enough questionable publicity.

I just checked the Acer support site and there are still NO Vista drivers. Since these systems are fairly expensive I would expect the drivers and stuff would have been ready for the enterprise launch but now we are close to the consumer launch of Vista and still no drivers?