T60/61 Win 7/8

[hhmcsv]

I am just in the process of configuring a T61 for a friend who had salt water poured on his HP/Compaq nc6400 under a fairly hard sail in the north sea in april. It was not a pretty sight inside

This T61 is having Win7 and much better (and newer) HW than my T60 (see below) with T7300 2GHz processor, 64 bit system and 4 Gb of RAM.
Even so, the difference in performance is fantastic, the T61 is OK but the T60 is way better. It boots in 18secs, wheras the T61 is 90 secs to get to the same state. And my T60 is feeling much crisper to use.
Half of the difference is caused by my use of a SSD (albeit at SATA-1 speeds) and the other half caused by using Win8 instead of the dated Win7

During the configuration, I noticed that the T61 could hang for some time at various tasks. A BIOS update solved all that

[ajkula66]

There is something *very* wrong with that T61 - most likely a software bug - if it takes that long to boot.

Obviously, a system with SSD will feel snappier than the one with a spinner when there's just a minor generational gap between them.

[dr_st]

There is nothing abnormal in 90 second boot times if there are a lot of drivers and software installed on the system. But on a freshly installed Windows that would indeed be surprising and suspicious.

[hhmcsv]

No, there is not a lot of software installed on the T61, and only the mostl needed is allowed at startup in msconfig. However, it has only a 5400rpm spinner. I do not know the exact installation history of the Win7 system, but various leftovers indicates that is was not a "clean install".

Fine machine though, with Intel graphics even though the date says november 2007

And an update: The new BIOS obvious did a lot of good, now the boot time is now 65 secs, much better but still over 3 times as long as my T60

[jronald]

My T60 with Vista B does the startup in less time than that. Something is up.

Ron