Until I get time to get it all sorted properly on a dedicated machine, I've installed Vista on my Tosh M200 Tablet PC which I've had a for a few years. It seemed such an easy proposition at first; install to a separate directory to keep it all separate and just see what happens.
Well the first tumbling block was the installation itself. The M200 comes with a 60Gb HDD as standard, all as one partition, I tried to install Vista but no... it needs it's own partition. No sharing with XP. So I went and got a copy of
Disk Director Suite 10, which allows in place partition editing. Great!
Except it didn't go to plan. I would change the partition size, so 30Gb for XP and 30Gb for Vista (yes, I need a bigger HDD in this sucker!), but on every reboot to apply the changes it would be back as one big 60Gb partition. After numerous attempts trying it slightly different ways I gave in and burnt the Boot CD that it can generate. I booted with that and YES it made the change.
Next step, boot to XP and insert the Vista DVD. Ok, first few dialogs go through fine, and then it just loses the DVD drive. Being an M200, there is no internal optical drive, so I use an external PCMCIA driven thing from around 99/00. Vista sees it at first but then just gives up. I assume it's at the point where more Vista code is running the show than XP.
So I tried booting off the Vista DVD. Same issue. Ok, boot to XP, copy the DVD to an attached USB2 HDD and run SETUP from there.
Yes! Finally! So Vista loads.
Then I have the display issue. The M200 has a 32Mb/64Mb nVidia display which is not exactly too hot, so there are no Vista drivers built in, and nothing forthcoming from Toshiba. Vista just wants to run in VGA mode (although SVGA, so there is control over the resolution), but not nice. Thankfully some video card gurus over at
LaptopVideo2Go have figured out what needs to be done to the INF files to force the install onto various machines, including my M200. Followed the instructions and all went well.
And it's been like that for a week now. Works fine for web compatibility testing (which is why I wanted it on in the first place) and Office 2007 runs fine as well.
But then, tonight, I thought I'd try the table orientation mode, ie, change the display from landscape to portrait, which make looking at websites nicer. I should have left it alone. But I didn't and was presented with a black screen, and only a pointer on the screen.
I powered down and restarted. Same again. I booted to safe mode, couldn't change the settings there, so rebooted again. Same problem. I was concerned that I'd have to reinstall the whole things again at this point. But I booted back into Safe Mode again and went into the Registry.
What I found was a bunch of Keys called "DefaultSettings.Orientation". My changes had set a couple of these to the value 3. I reset them to 0, rebooted and Hurrah! All back again.
So, whilst Vista *does* work on the M200, it's not entirely happy...
