Why i can´t see my windows vista aero settings?

Question

I buy windows vista home premium, mostly because of the aero and i can´t see it in my laptop. I first enter in the that vista community on the internet and they told me that i need a video card but a guy in compusa told me they were wrong, that i only need the drivers. so i call dell and the told me i got them all. But i still can see it.
My computer is:
Intel (R) Pentuim (R) M processor 1.70GHz
504 MB RAM
Mobile Intel (R) 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Chipset Family (Microsoft. Co -XDDM)

Can anyone help me. Thanks a lot

I don´t understand why some people told me that i just need a card and the others told me that won´t solve anything.

I was checking my computer papers and they said:
40GB and 512MB
but now my computer says:
34.1 GB and 504MB

What happen?

Answer 1

Aero is considered a "Premium feature" that has additional hardware requirements, including but not limited to 1GB of memory. See the following site for more info:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905075.aspx

Answer 2

I had a similar problem, where I could see Aero when the drivers for my graphics card weren't installed, and where I couldn't see Aero when the drivers were installed.

What's happening is Vista is recognizing your graphics card as incapable of running Aero, when in fact it might be perfectly capable. Vista is therefore preventing you from using Aero to try and optimize performance and stop your computer from crashing.

You just have to get used to the fact that Vista is an extremely hardware intensive operating system.

The main way to solve this problem is to go out and buy a new graphics card. When doing so, you may also want to consider upgrading other aspects of your computer, especially the RAM and possibly the processor.

You could have avoided all of this by buying a Mac.

EDIT: I noticed that the person above said that you should be using 1GB of RAM. Well yes, you should, but I don't think that having less than 1GB will prevent your computer from running Aero. I have 512MB of RAM, and Vista was showing fine on my computer with all of the drivers installed except for the graphics card driver. Therefore I think that upgrading your graphics card should be enough, but investing in some extra RAM wouldn't go amiss either.

Answer 3

Its hard to say, but you may be a victim of the vista syndrome. It may well be that vista has decided on your behalf that your laptop is just too slow for the flashy bits and so removed them.

It is an interesting thing to note that vista has prompted some software sellers to accept the return of opened software (vista) as it cannot be guaranteed to operate as advertised on a given machine.

Take your laptop to the place where you bought vista, show them and ask them what the problem may be... you may be looking at getting your money back and installing the original OS back onto your laptop. I would guess RAM (504 Mb is a bit low) and a Pentium M at 1.7 Ghz may be a bit slow too, but the big killer is usually the video card, which you most likely cant change.

Answer 4

you will need a graphics card with at least 128 mb memory to run aero