I have been looking at Vista SP1 and it has cleaned up many of the performance issues I was having but does not address my biggest problem, the fact that the Intel 945GM drivers for Vista are unstable and slow.

I have a Dell 620 and I love it, but Dell has not kept up with Intel driver releases and the installer from Intel detects that you are using an OEM machine and will not install. The good news is that once the Intel driver has extracted and pops up the error message asking you to get an updated driver from your OEM, you can leave the error dialog up, go to %temp% and copy the extracted files to another location. Then dismiss the error dialog and let it clean up after itself.  Now you can go to Device Manager, right click on the display driver and tell it to update from the location you saved the files too and it will happily do so.

Even the latest Vista driver for the 945GM directly from Intel is much slower than running under XP, it is much better than the old driver still being distributed by Dell.

Tags: vista, intel, drivers, 845gm, sp1, xp, workaround