Installed Windows Vista on T30

[monkeybagel]

I just installed Windows Vista 5472 Ultimate on my ThinkPad T30 2367-QU2 and thought I would share my experiences. The installation completed without a hitch. I booted from the DVD and removed my Windows XP partition and created a new partition during Windows Vista Setup to install Vista. So far the installation has worked well. I have a 60GB hard disk and 768MB of RAM - everything else is standard - a Pentium 4M 2.0, Radeon 7500, 14.1" LCD @ 1024x768, DVD-ROM, and Cisco Aironet 802.11b built-in wireless network card. Performance is acceptable - much better than the previous builds on other PCs, however this if the first build I have installed on the T30. I do not get Windows Desktop Composition so I do not have the Flip3D features, Taskbar thumbnails and other Aero Glass features, but that is due to the older video card.

After installation, my video card was detected as a Standard VGA adapter running at 800x600. My Cisco Aironet card was not detected, and the IBM Power Management device was not detected. After connecting to the wired network, I went to Windows Update and all of the drivers were located and installed. The Cisco Aironet driver on Vista's Windows Update site does not support WPA, however. I then installed the latest driver from Cisco's Web Site and I then had WPA functionality and could connect to my wireless network.

Windows Vista does remove the ability to boot to the recovery partition, so be sure to have a repair floppy disk available for when you want to revert to the factory IBM Windows XP image.

I tried to enable BitLocker drive encryption to secure the C: drive and followed the steps needed to prepare the hard disk for BitLocker (you need an available empty partition of 1.5GB or greater formatted NTFS), but was a little disappointed to discover that the T30 only supports TPM 1.1b instead of the required 1.2 version required by Vista.

Overall the performance is good. Internet Explorer 7+ is fast and responsive a loading and rendering web sites. Scrolling complex web sites in IE7+ can be a little jumpy - I have noticed this on my desktop machine that runs an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and 1600x1200 resolution. Vista insists on defragging its hard disk immediately after installation, so at first it can be really slow and the hard disk with thrash for a little while but afterwards the speed is decent. I have yet to see a blue screen so far, and will continue testing it for the next several weeks. One thing I noticed is that the Windows Telnet Client is not installed by default in Windows Vista, you have to add it in Vista's equivalent of Add/Remove Windows Components feature in Control Panel.

I haven't tried to install any of the IBM specific applications in Vista yet - it seems to have everything I need including decent power management and good wireless networking utilities.

One thing I do not like is the Network Activity icon in the system tray does not show actual data being transmitted. You can turn on activity animation but it is not an actual representation of the data being transmitted on the wire or over the air.

I haven't owned the laptop very long to see what the typical battery life is with Windows XP so I can't compare it to Vista, but I will note what I get with Windows Vista with normal usage and try to post it here. The battery is not new - it has about 160+ cycles on it but seems to be healty. I think it gets around 2hrs with Windows XP, but I haven't timed it exactly.

Jeff

[rkawakami]

FYI:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26989

Original poster installed it on a T23.

[monkeybagel]

I am assuming that is Beta 2 build 5384.4 since it wasn't specified. The later builds seem to have much better performance, which is good for owners with older laptops. 512MB is the minimum RAM for Windows Vista which from my experience seems like 128MB in Windows XP.

FYI:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26989

Original poster installed it on a T23.