Hello, guys! I hope this will turn out to be a great discussion
I'm really confused which version of Windows works best on a ThinkPad T61 [2 GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro video] - I've tried both, Windows 7 runs really smoothly for the first couple of months and then suddenly things seem to slow down. I perform disk cleanups, defragmentation and virus scan on a regular basis, and still can't get the desired results after a few months of work.
In the other hand, XP's system requirements are tempting, but it's old interface makes it a little bit annoying.

So tell me your experience with both operating systems, and help me decide which one I should install. I know 7 is the future, XP support ends in less than 2 years [there's still time though].

Thanks

2GB is the minimum for running W7 comfortably.
Increase it to 3 or 4 GB.
Stop running regular defrags, there's no need for that any more.
Switch off System Restore, it eats an awful lot of space and is not very useful IMHO.

So basically downgrading to XP is not worth it?

I wouldn't downgrade. Win7 is much safer and was improved in many areas over XP. My guess is that you have more a software issue, since the T61 hardware could easily cope with Win7. As RBS said, you should deactivate system restore and also any other services you don't need.

Are you also using some antivirus Software? Do you have all drivers updated? What about the BIOS version? Make sure you don't have background software running all the time...

+1 - OP, have you ran any spyware/malware scans on your ThinkPad at all (i.e. Spybot and/or Malwarebytes Antimalware) but also have you downloaded & ran the CrystalDiskInfo utility to confirm there are no issues with the HDD/s your using in your ThinkPad?

You shouldn't have any trouble with Win7 and 2-4GB of RAM. Keep your Microsoft Security Essentials up to date, your Windows Updates up to date, and use Firefox or Chrome as your browser. XP would be like stepping back in time.

Okay guys, I'll stay with 7
As I wrote, I run anti-virus checks regularly (AVG Free), my HDD works just fine (no bad sectors & etc), so everything should be working fine.

thanks for your opinions

AVG Free may be part of the problem. I abandoned AVG Free a couple years ago because each new version slowed down my computers more. I found Avira faster and Avast even faster, though Avast caused problems on certain web sites. So I now run Microsoft Security Essentials on all my computers.

Most of my computers run either Vista or 7, and all computers with more than 3GB of RAM use 64-bit Windows. Several computers still run XP but as soon as XP support ends in April 2014, I will either upgrade them or disconnect them from the internet.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that you should run CCleaner (from ccleaner.com) to clean up your hard drive at least once a week.

Things can slow down if you pick up garbage-ware that takes CPU cycles and memory. And by you saying it slows down after a few months, that is what I think is going on.

Agreed on this. I used to swear by AVG, now I just swear at it.

As long as you're not a "dangerous" surfer, Microsoft Security Essentials is more than adequate, free, and supported IIRC.

MSE.

It's an excellent, lightweight software package. I recommend it to a lot of people.

AVG, Avast, Avira, NOD32, they all bod down machines.

We shall not discuss the horrors known as McAffee or Norton (yes I know they are working on that).

My opinion is simple and straightforward. If you're paying for the OS, then get vista, it's cheap and is comparable with seven, and much better then XP. Most T61 systems shipped with it so you won't even have to buy it. If the OS is free, then get Seven, it's well supported on all T61 hardware and surprisingly hasn't done anything to make it a resourcehog. XP annoys me everytime I set it up... it's more work, everything is more complicated and it just doesn't have any redeeming quality if you're running a core2 system with at least a gig or two of ram. Sure XP will run on less, but that doesn't mean it will do anything fun, unless maybe if you install ten year old software.

XP is a stable operating system, so don't think I'm bashing it, but even if you buy the latest version with sp3 it still doesn't support SATA or SSD, and if you want to slip the SATA drivers in during install, it has to be loaded on a floppy disc, you can't even use a cdrom, usb, or anything else, and who even has a floppy drive anymore. I've also never liked the 64bit version of XP, so if you want to use more then 3gb of ram you have to get something like 03 datacenter/enterprise which cost thousands of $$$. Vista bussiness 64 runs great on a T61 with 2-8gb ram.

Amen, TuuS! XP is way overrated, whereas Vista is way underrated! Countless people have wasted countless money and time to avoid Vista, simply because they (or their friends) had bad experience with the RTM or even the beta version back in 2006/2007, on machines with specs that barely met the system requirements. Aside from taking up about 3GB to 5GB more HDD space than Windows 7, Vista is virtually as snappy and stable as 7, looks nicer than both 7 and XP, and is much more secure and easier to set up than XP. Vista and the T61 is a great combination, for the reasons TuuS eloquently explained.

Dawnbreaker, if you are avoiding Vista just because you don't have the recovery discs, you can download Vista for free as instructed here: http://en.community.dell.com/support-fo ... river.aspx . In this case, you will need to use the product key printed on the T61's COA sticker. I just went through this to install 64-bit Vista on my HP dc7900 desktop a couple days ago and it went well.

@Temetka -- "We shall not discuss the horrors known as McAffee or Norton"

I've been using McAfee for years, and I don't notice any of my machines 'bogging down' -- but maybe what I don't notice can hurt me? Years ago I swore off Norton and will never go back, but I haven't had problems with McAfee. I have put MSE on a few machines for friends and on my son's machine. One or two of those machines have come up with spyware, but I attributed it to young persons net-surfing choices

Maybe I should try MSE on one of my daily-use machines -- but I'm not sure I would be able to tell the difference in MSE and McAfee -- I use my machines for email/youtube/internet shopping/and of course the Forum -- not sure if I should try out MSE?

I've got to disagree with you there, Vista is a dog. I've run Vista and 7 on the same machine and the difference is remarkable. I still occasionally redeploy Vista for folks when I'm doing side work, and if you have a machine with reasonable specs, you can get away with using it for general office/web browsing stuff. Still, I'd take a 7 machine with 2GB over a Vista machine with 4GB any day of the week.

I will agree with you about XP64. It's just a rebadged version of Server 2003, but drivers and application compatibility are a real issue with it. Best of avoid.

You *can* add SATA/etc drivers into an XP install without a floppy, though. The easy method is nlite, but you can do it by hand. http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1045&mpage=1

Not "get away" and not "office/browsing". If you've got a machine with reasonable specs, and did some tweaks, Vista is just as good for everything as XP/7. It is not as optimized out of the box, but with a few tweaks, and with the latest service packs it runs fine.

I agree completely. When vista first RTMed, it had some problems, but not as bad as was suggested by many. There was even a version floating around that an engineer stripped down and redesigned, it was small enough that the setup disc fit on a standard CDrom disc and I installed it on a dell laptop with a pentium3 cpu and 256mb of ram and it ran well... better and faster then XP on the same machine. Unfortunately it was a shortlived success story, as soon as you try to update anything on it the heavily modded os became unstable, but it was interesting to see vista ultimate running on such old hardware with far below the min ram requirement, and running well.

If you have substantially less performance on vista compared to seven (or xp), then there is something wrong, perhaps drivers? I've found vista to be very comparable in performance. Also, you can install a 64bit version using your 32bit key, and if anyone needs a key and setup disc, I have some I'm sharing in the marketplace.

I do like seven better, but on a budget I'm much rather see the money go into some ram or cpu upgrade then the OS.


@easymac, I have added sata to my winxp setup disc using nlite, and am willing to share it with the community, but my point is why didn't microsoft do this??? and why does the factory disc not allow a usb memory card to slip in the drivers instead of insisting on a floppy disc? it's just beyond annoying.

I've also added SATA to a 03 datacenter x86 disc, which is a 32bit windows xp based operating system that allows upto 64gb of ram. I've used it for testing on my T61 with 8gb of ram and it works great, but I think even a single user license for this OS is well over $1000, and Vista business 64 licenses I have in abundance for only $20, and I believe vista is far superior. Windows seven rarely sells for less then $120 for an oem, much higher retail. I can sometimes get good deals on used licenses, but we probably won't see them getting affordable until long after windows 8 goes RTM.

Fair enough on the tweaking; you can *make* it work if you *really* need to. I think we'll see the price of Win7 licenses drop pretty quickly with Win8 Upgrades (from as far back as XP) going for $40.

What "tweaks" are you guys referring to? Every time I install Vista (I have done it probably 20 to 30 times), I install a virus scanner first, then set the firewall to "block all incoming connectioins", then get online to install all Microsoft updates, then go to Computer Properties to choose "Adjust for best performance", and finally set the virtual memory's initial size and maximum size to the same value. That's all I do and all these computers ran (and still run) very smoothly.

In some cases you may want to disable some of the services such as Superfetch, which are designed to optimize your performance, but if the system is too old/weak, they may do more harm than good. On a strong enough system even that's not necessary.

People who installed Vista early ran into various problems, mostly with unstable drivers and yes, even some OS bugs. These were eventually weeded out. I installed Vista relatively late, and even I ran into a problem with a buggy wireless driver. Other than that it's been running super-smooth, and I daresay that I even experience less strange hickups compared to Win7 (though I haven't done an apple-to-apple comparison).

The thing is, that if you put price aside, Win7 does everything Vista does, and then some things a bit better. So other than price, I see no reason to get Vista nowadays. There was a relatively short timeframe when Vista was already very mature and stable, and Win7 not yet available, and this happened to be exactly the time when I built my last desktop system. This is why my main rig still runs Vista, and it will stay this way until it's succeeded by a different main rig.

I agree with dr_st completely. Windows Seven doesn't have many of the new version setbacks that previous windows upgrades had, such as requiring much more memory, so if it wasn't for price, I'd go with Win7, but I think Vista can run just as well in most cases. One of the reasons Vista wasn't accepted is the initial opinion of the user account controls was found to be annoying to most people. This feature was vastly misunderstood, and even if it did bother someone that much, it's an easy matter to disable it, but the benefits it offers were many. In that era there were many websites that were installing malware on a "drive by" basis, without asking for confirmation, or by displaying a false warning. With vista it would refuse to let anything install without redundant warnings at user and admin levels... people hated this, but it was a silly reason to denounce the OS. Driver issues were plenty, but that really wasn't entirely microsofts fault, much of the industry didn't care about writing drivers for old hardware, so it took a wile for the rest of the world to "catch up" to vista. By the time Vista was up and running full speed (about SP1 in my opinion), the word on the street was to downgrade back to XP (very bad advice)

I really do like Vista a lot, and to show my appreciation for this underrated OS, I'm going to offer a $10 discount on a used copy of Vista Business 32 or 64bit. That is an original Vista RTM disc downloaded direct from microsoft (your choice of 32 or 64bit) that has service pack two integrated and a genuine microsoft COA for only $20 shipped (domestic). I have these listed in the marketplace for $30, but I've selected (5) of them to offer to readers of this thread (PM for details). I'm practically giving them away at this price, so the only thing I ask is that you give it a good "road test" and report your findings/opinions for others to benefit from. The Vista Business is the same as the Professional versions of windows, just a different name was used on vista. I also have ultimate, basic, but in much smaller quantities, and XP professional.

As for the tweaks, I have tried many modded versions of windows. There are many traded online that have had a lot of unneeded (bovine excrement) removed, things like indexing of files, a lot of completely redundant apps that no one ever uses, things like that. When Vista ultimate first went RTM, the setup disc used nearly a full DVDr disc, and the 64bit version required dual layer (until sp1 which will fit on a single layer), but the stripped down version I tested fit on a 700mb CDr disc. I didn't find anything missing on it that I would have used, things like "wordpad" for example are completely redundant... if I needed a text editor that bad I could use notepad, but I install OpenOffice on all my systems anyway so wordpad never gets used. Indexing service runs in the background keeping track of all your files so you can search them faster, but the cost is using up precious resources and I don't often need to do searches on my own drive and even if I do, on those rare moments I don't mind waiting a few minutes longer for the search to complete. There are many such things which can be stripped out to make windows "lean n mean", instead of "fat and bloated". For Windows XP, one of my favorite versions was done by a group called "eXPerience", that tweaked all 2000/XP/2003 versions on three levels. Full, Tiny and Micro. Full gives you everything the microsoft version offers but with some enhancements for performance (for example, indexing is disabled but not removed). Tiny is my favorite. The .iso file is about 288mb if I recall correctly, and it installs only the basic OS and optionally lets you decide if you want Internet explorer or windows media player installed. This version will generally run faster using much less ram and is completely legal to use as long as you own a license for the version you're using. The Micro version will run on 64mb of ram and the .iso is well under 100mb in size. I've used it as a secondary operating system for doing repair work by installing on a separate partition along with some recovery software and repair tools. I do admit that this version can be annoying when it comes to getting some hardware to work on it. I got a massive headache getting my wifi to work with it, but this is to be expected when you strip something down this far. In summery, if you have a very old system that and want to make it usable, one of these versions is a great option, and even if you have a fast system but you're into gaming or other resource intensive use like video encoding, then I'd recommend trying one of them. Windows tries to be a "jack of all trades", and ends up becoming so bloated that it turns out to be "master of none". Microsoft even gave up on using Windows as a base for the Xbox in favor of Linux, which is another option for older hardware, but I won't go off topic by discussing linux in this thread.

Thank you once again guys, for turning this topic to a really nice and quality discussion! [Much appreciated and learned some things I haven't know].

Anyway, I've installed XP a couple of days ago, just to give it another shot and I was totally disappointed. I needed about 3 or 4 hours to install proper drivers, sometimes the keyboard didn't work at the system startup (I even couldn't log on into the system, because it's always password protected). Usually it used about 900mb RAM with all programs running, but their startup time was extremely delayed. The only thing I always digged about it - the windows classic interface [makes the system very light and reliable] couldn't make me stick with it.

Bottom line, Windows 7 works so much better on my thinkpad t61 - installed and configured it the system for less than 2 hours without any driver/software problems.

For those of you who recommended me Vista, I agree - like many people I ignored it unreasonably, though I've installed it once or twice. But to be honest Seven turns out to be a really good upgrade of Vista, and both systems have proven that they're so much stable and reliable than XP. At least on my system.

*EDIT*
And by the way folks, after a couple of years running 7, I discovered there's a windows classic theme build in 7. Not it works even faster, I've never get used to Aero.