Windows Vista on Acer Aspire A315-21.

[Jakob99]

I have an Acer Aspire A315-21 and I decided to mess around with Windows Vista, and with the help of @K4sum1, got the AMD graphics to work wonderfully after installing @win32's Extended Kernel (I also got XP 64-bit to install).

 

Laptop Specs:

AMD Radeon 9220e Radeon R4 5 compute cores 2C+3G 1.60 GHz.

8GB of ram (can be upgraded to 12, but allegedly can be upgraded to 20 by putting a 16 in there, but this is untested by me, and I offer no guarantees!)

Acer Aspire A315-21 with Ethernet, USB3 port on the left, below the Ethernet, and two USB2 ports below the power supply plug.

AMD Radeon R4 Stoney Ridge Graphics.

1TB SSD (for this test only. The actual product will ship with a 256GB SSD that has Windows 10 Home Edition).

 

What I got working:

Realtek Audio

Realtek Ethernet

Elan Touchpad

The entire AMD Chipset including USB3 and SATA except for AMD Serial IO

AMD Graphics.

Realtek Card Reader.

 

What didn't work:

Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 WiFi (unsupported card, needs to be swapped out with a Vista capable card, Ethernet used, or USB WiFi carried in).

Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 Bluetooth (although you can get rid of its Unknown Device by installing the Generic Microsoft Bluetooth Device).

AMD Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (this caused a BSOD upon installing it if I'm remembering correctly).

 

Untested:

NVMe (I could never get the NVMe slot in this laptop to work with any of my drives. Maybe they are the wrong type, who knows).

 

Known Issues:

There's nothing show-stopping here. Does not suffer from the Haswell bugs obviously, but more importantly, it does not suffer from the Ryzen BSOD bugs! The perfect platform for running Vista on 2019 hardware!

Properties:

 

Device Manager:

 

AMD Radeon R4 Stoney Ridge Graphics:

 

AMD PSP 2.0 Device:

 

AMD SATA Controller:

 

AMD USB 3.0 Host Controller:

 

Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 (unsupported on Vista):

Enjoy!

EDIT: Yes, this topic was inspired by @Carlos S. M.'s topic on running Windows 7 on Alder Lake. You can tell by the format of this thread being very similar to his, lol.

Edited October 19, 2023 by Jakob99

[NotHereToPlayGames]

2 hours ago, Jakob99 said:

I'm selling off

This is strictly forbidden here at MSFN.  See Rule #13.

[Jakob99]

5 hours ago, NotHereToPlayGames said:

This is strictly forbidden here at MSFN.  See Rule #13.

I'll delete that part, then. Forgot about that rule.