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Posted by Barry Watzman on October 7, 2006, 4:11 pm
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I have a question for owners of Toshiba Satellite A105 models that use
Intel GMA [Graphics Media Accelerator] 950 onboard chipset video.
[There are way over five dozen configuration models ("Snnnn" suffixes)
of the A105 series. Some of these use GMA 900, and some apparently use
an ATI video chip. This question, however, relates ONLY to models using
Intel GMA950 shared-memory chipset video systems.]
Are any of you running Vista RC1 (build 5600) or RC2 (build 5744), and
if so, did your laptop using Intel GMA950 video run the "Aero" user
interface "out of the box" (without using any external patches or drivers)?
I'm trying to get a good handle as to whether or not the A105's with
GMA950 video will or will not run Aero. I'm considering buying a model
with this configuration and I need a straight answer.
I know that there were some alternate drivers and patches that did
enable Aero with GMA950 video on some early builds of Vista, but I don't
want to consider such options at this time as there is no guarantee that
they will be available or will work with the final release of Vista (at
least one widely publicized such combination of drivers and patches that
did work with some early Vista beta versions no longer works with more
recent builds).
Actually, the question is much wider than the Satellite A105 or even
Toshiba, as there are a ton of laptops that use Intel GMA950 video. And
there doesn't seem to be a straight answer as to whether or not GMA950
will or will not officially support Aero when Vista is finally released.
[On paper, even GMA900 (also used in some A105 laptops) supports Aero,
e.g. it has 128MB of memory and pixel shader 2.0 support, but in fact
there is no available WDDM driver that really enables Aero on GMA900.
And my further investigation even raises serious doubt about Aero
support for GMA950.]
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