T61 and windows 10

[bluetomgold]

Hey guys, after a cheap solid machine for my 6 year old son, been looking at t61s on eBay. I had one a few years back and liked it.

Looking on the Lenovo site the drivers only seem to go up to windows 7. As well as general tasks, he’d like to run minecraft windows 10 edition. I think the machine is powerful enough, but it would need proper graphics support.

Am I likely to have issues getting things working properly with windows 10?

[kfzhu1229]

Hey guys, after a cheap solid machine for my 6 year old son, been looking at t61s on eBay. I had one a few years back and liked it.

Looking on the Lenovo site the drivers only seem to go up to windows 7. As well as general tasks, he’d like to run minecraft windows 10 edition. I think the machine is powerful enough, but it would need proper graphics support.

Am I likely to have issues getting things working properly with windows 10?

Which graphics do you have? Intel, NVidia NVS or Quadro?
If you have intel, I find that while the intel GMA driver technically works just fine in Windows 10, it has all sorts of small quirks that drove me nuts on my Dell Latitude D830 that I eventually swapped the board out for a revised NVidia board. Some of the quirks under Windows 10 include:
1. crap image bitrates - the Windows 10 wallpaper looks like as if it is rendered by 24-bit colour instead of 32 and with decreased contrast ratios. This really looks horrible on the Ultrasharp screen of this Dell and will look even more so on a Flexview IPS.
2. Crap video rendering quality. While 720p and 1080p video plays just fine as long as you have a reasonably fast Core 2 duo/extreme inside, the edges of fonts and other objects look all fuzzy.
3. Instead of displaying black bars for 16:9 video on a 4:3 or 16:10 display, the bars are white and are extremely distracting if you use any Windows store based app.
And you can forget about Minecraft on the intel GMA as it is some of the worst integrated solutions back then. You are using drivers that barely are designed for Windows 7 so forget about games in general.
If you have a NVidia board, please triple check whether you have the safe date code thing. You can also check by searching up the codename printed on the die.
The Nvidia drivers go all the way into Windows 8 support I think and thus works far better in Windows 10.
The NVidia chip also supports native H264 decoding so video playback is far more seamless if you use h264ify.

[RealBlackStuff]

Spend a bit more money and instead look for a T420 with 1600x900 screen.

[bluetomgold]

Thanks guys, yep I’ll have a look at T420s.

[kfzhu1229]

Thanks guys, yep I’ll have a look at T420s.

Oh you don't have one yet? Sorry my bad I thought you already purchased one.
In this case yeah you are better off either getting a newer Sandy or Ivy bridge T420/30, T520/30 with NVidia graphics, or if LOCALLY you are lucky enough to come across a cheap enough T61 or the Dell and HP equivalents like my Latitude D830 for C$35 with an Ultrasharp display. Without the help of Taobao, getting a revised NVidia board for these things at reasonable prices might be a challenge these days.

[TPFanatic]

Laptop prices are dropping, you can look even newer. T430 is the oldest with OEM Windows 10 support. I'd skip T440p if you like using the built in touchpad/trackpoint as the build in buttonless unit sucks, and modding in a usable T450 unit is an avoidable process if you just go for a T450 or newer.