Reader F.T. asks: I did the same thing as you this past week [upgrade a D600 to Vista], I have the same ATI Radeon 9000 as you. Have you been able to do anything else with the laptop so that you can use all the features of Vista?
I’m assuming this question is about Vista’s Aero Glass features like Flip-3D, Taskbar thumbnail previews, and transparency. If so, the simple answer is that a Dell Latitude D600 notebook with an ATI Radeon 9000 graphics chipset (32MB dedicated graphics RAM) simply doesn’t meet the specs required for those Vista features. So, while Vista works perfectly well in other respects on a D600, you will not see the snazzy new graphical features.
It was just a stroke of luck that my cheap desktop PC had a decent graphics chipset (nVidia 6600) with enough shared video RAM (128MB). I hadn’t actually expected to see any Aero Glass feature on it while planning the upgrade.