Toshiba Portege M400, Windows Vista, and BOINC

My Toshiba Portege M200 notebook was in need of an upgrade.  A couple weeks ago I purchased an Toshiba Portege M400 and it finally arrived on Wednesday.

After burning the recovery DVD’s I set about installing Windows Vista Beta 2 on it.  After my second try I finally got things up and running right, I failed in my first attempt since I attempted to install the Toshiba HDD shock protection driver which caused the BSOD.  I searched around the blogshere and found out that the Bluetooth drivers were safe to install so I did that.  I also had to change the video driver that Vista picked to the ‘Intel Lakeport Graphics Controller’ in order to view Aero Glass.

So I have everything up and running except the built-in IDE RAID controller and the HDD shock protection driver.

The system has a built-in TPM module which is pretty cool and I’m going to go ahead and try to get Bitlocker running on the machine after I make a backup.  What is interesting though is that windows detected and installed the fingerprint reader but hasn’t given me an option of associating a fingerprint with a user account out of the box.  Even though the machine comes with a finger print reader I think I’m going to stick with my plan of using smart cards.  I’m not gutsy enough for an RFID implant and the finger print readers are a little awkward for me.  What would be the bomb for me is an iris scanner.

After a little fiddling around with a manual installation of BOINC it appears to run just fine with Aero Glass. Here is a picture of it.

I’m going to see if the guys at IBM think it would be a cool idea to make the background image in the Simple GUI translucent.  I think that would be neat.