As requested, I tried to put together my experience with installing Windows Vista on ASUS R2H. I will not cover the actual Vista installation, as it's pretty much straight forward, I will concentrate on steps to take before and after installation - please feel free to ask any question if I miss anything.
PreparationSince the official Asus Windows Vista upgrade DVD has yet to be released, the best option would be to keep Windows XP working and install Vista on it's own separate partition. More than that, I usually create a separate partition for personal documents and files, to store away from the OS partitions. I would recommend keeping the Asus recovery partition for now, just in case you will need to restore XP Tablet.
You can use any partition manager of your choice, but I would warmly recommend
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 (49.99$ download install) - I previously had pretty bad experiences with PartitionMagic, and I would like to underline how important it is to use a reliable partition editor.
Here is my partition table:
Recovery partition (original, hidden, FAT32) - 3.90 GB
Windows XP (C:, NTFS) - 9 GB
Windows Vista (D:, NTFS) - 15 GB
Personal (E:, NTFS) - 27.98 GB
InstallationAs with previous RC releases and with this final release as well, I have used the .iso distribution to install, mainly because I wasn't going to keep them and because I don't have a USB DVD drive. For a hdd installation, you can extract its contents using say
WinRAR (great archiving utility, shareware) or you can mount the .iso archive in
Virtual Clone Drive (free) - with the first option you need additional space, once extracted go into the newly created folder and run setup.exe, as with the second option, just double-click the .iso to mount the image and it will auto-start the installer.
Since this is an installation from hdd, the Vista Upgrade option will not be available, and I wouldn't recommend it anyway. Just follow the on-screen instructions and install Vista on its dedicated partition.
If necessary to make the note, I chose to install the Business edition, to see exactly what it offers, since I understand this is the version you get from the Asus upgrade program.
If I remember correctly it will require a reboot and when finished you will have two options at boot, one for Windows XP (previous Windows version) and one for Windows Vista (default boot option from now on) - you can use the D-pad up/down buttons to choose the Windows version you want to boot and D-pad center button to run it.
Post installation stepsWhen you runVista for the fist time you will notice the pen is not calibrated, if you have problems logging in, use the joystick and mouse buttons to type the password (the joystick is quite slow with default drivers). I should make the note that I didn't need an external keyboard throughout the installation process, mainly because most of the setup ran in XP and later on I could use the pen. You probably need a keyboard if you perform the installation from a USB DVD drive.
Once logged on, I would recommend calibrating the pen: click the Orb (new Start button) > Control Panel > Mobile PC > Tablet PC settings > Calibrate the screen.
If you find Vista slow, wait until it loads and the HDD led stops flashing, and in my case I chose to use the standard Windows theme, but obviously this is a personal choice (Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization > Change the theme).
If you are like me and you want to keep your personal files away from the system files, here is a tutorial on how to do just that - the sooner you do this the better. I've done this with My Documents and Links for XP for years, and it's a very easy way to keep your files no matter hour many times you decide to re-install Windows.
Installing Vista drivers & utilities
o ATK Hotkey UTILITY
Download from one of the following locations ( Global - USA - Europe - China ) and install.
o ATKDrv UTILITY
Download from one of the folllwing locations (Global - USA - Europe - China ) and install.
o Audio
Although Vista detected and installed a driver for the sound chip, I couldn't get any sound. Installing the Asus driver (Audio_vista_070315.zip) brought the bells back into the game.
Alternate download locations: Global - USA - Europe - China
o Camera
Download the appropriate driver: Bison (CMOS_Camera_Bison_vista_070315.zip) or D-Max (CMOS_Camera_D-Max_M331_vista_070315.zip) and install. My model has a Bison camera - if not sure open Computer Management and double check in the Imaging devices section.
Alternate download locations - Bison: Global - USA - Europe - China
Alternate download locations - DMax: Global - USA - Europe - China
Bison only: If the above driver doesn't work for you, see this post for alternate driver + registry fix.
o Card reader
Download & install driver from Asus website (RICOH_Vista32bit_070125.zip)
Alternate download locations: Global - USA - Europe - China
o INTEL Inf Update
Download from either Asus or Intel website (INFUpdate_Vista_061122.zip) - follow the installation steps as per previous post for XP, the only difference for the zip distribution is to extract first and then run "setup.exe -A"
Alternate download locations: Global - USA - Europe - China
o INTEL Graphics Driver
Download from Asus website (VGA_vista_070315.zip) and install.
Alternate download locations: Global - USA - Europe - China
o Fingerprint driver and utility
Download (FingerPrints_vista_070315.zip) and install by running SetupIAM.exe. This will install the Asus Security Protect Manager as you know it and the fingerprint reader driver. Restat when prompted and when Vista is back on, logon and register your fingerprints.
I had a bit of trouble with this, but hopefully it won't happen to you - as I was registering my fingerprints , Vista locked-up and I had to restart. When Vista came back the touch screen wasn't working and there was no on-screen keyboard either. Now is a good time to have a USB keyboard around, or logon using Remote Desktop from another computer, change to a blank password and then use the joystick to click your user icon to logon ;-) Open Computer Management and check if the Human Interface Device has a yellow question mark, relict, right-click and choose Uninstall. Then push the "Scan for Hardware changes" button in the toolbar to re-install the HID drivers, and now the touch-screen should be working again. Then I could register my fingerprints with no problems and it worked just fine since.
Alternate download locations: Global - USA - Europe - China
o Joystick
Works out of the box, although it is very slow - download & install the new driver from Asus website (TouchPad_Vista32_64_070125.zip).
Alternate download locations: Global - USA - Europe - China
o LAN
Download driver (Global - USA - Europe - China) and install.
o Wireless
Asus recommends to install the wireless console application first (Wireless_Console_VISTA_070307.zip) and then install the driver (WLAN_ASUS_WL_159G_vista_070315.zip). The console is the application that sits in the tray area and shows the bouncy icons when you push the wireless control button - if you don't use this feature you can stop it using Autoruns.
Alternate download locations:
Wireless Console: Global - USA - Europe - China
Wireless Driver: Global - USA - Europe - China
