I’m still searching for a WDDM driver for my Geforce Go 7400 that will work under Vista RC1. For those who haven’t been initiated into the joys of laptop video drivers for vista it goes something like this. Vista’s Aero Glass, flip 3d etc require hardware accelleration to work. Because they’re now a fairly core OS resource Vista needs special WDDM drivers so it can virtualize these video resources if necessary (the same way the OS virtualizes main memory if required). Video card manufacturers have been releasing WDDM drivers in-step with the Vista releases, but only for desktop hardware. Due to the more “integrated” nature of laptops the video card manufacturers seem to expect the laptop vendors to provide the drivers that are known to work on their notebooks (no doubt with the help of the video card manufacturers). Notebook manufacturers (largely) don’t seem to give a hoot that they sold you a laptop with a little “vista capable” sticker on it, they’re not releasing updated drivers every time Redmond drops another beta or CTP. Laptop video enthusiasts try to fill this void by providing modified .inf files and installers, but the results are fairly patchy. I’m sure you can imagine how stable a beta OS, with beta drivers that have been modified just so they can install would be. For beta 2 I was able to get pretty good stability with a driver version that was half a release behind the (then) current one, and by telling Vista that I really had a geforce go 6600 - good enough for Aero Glass and the rest of the eye candy. For RC1 the latest 96.33 drivers give me about 2 minutes of beautiful hardware accellerated desktop experience before causing vista to either freeze up completely with a screen full of weird rendering glitches, or blue screen. I can now boot into safe mode, go into the control centre and uninstall my newly installed video drivers almost with my eyes closed now.
Update: I was able to get Aero Glass working beautifully using the 95.64 drivers and modified .inf files here. The .inf file listed about 7 different “Geforce Go 7400” entries and #5 worked for me (the others are presumably for other laptop OEMs. They worked for a few minutes before blue-screening). Now that it is all up and running Vista RC1 looks great.