Thinkpads Forum

So my thinkpad just arrived yesterday and since it was so wonderfully loaded (at least imho) i figured, why not take a shot and put vista on it to see how it goes.
The first thing I noticed was that the setup freaks you out. When it shows you the list of hardware/software incompatible with vista, you wonder if its ever going to boot. I figured, since I had no data to lose on the machine I'd go ahead and install it anyway, and thankfully it worked.
With the pre-RC1 build, most of the stuff works straight away including the touchpad and trackpoint. One thing that i noticed was that you could no longer scroll with the touchpad- I don't know if this is a vista issue or a driver issue. Also, make sure you install the latest display drivers.
One thing I was eager to check out was what windows thought of my machine- unfortunately it gives it a 2.8 / 10. The primary harddisk performance is what gets that score- I assume this is a driver issue because the SATA controller was one of the things that was flagged as incompatible. On the graphics front, it gets a 4.6 graphics and a 3.9 gaming graphics which are alright since it lets you have glass. However, things like the vista photo gallery slide show are played at a lower resolution (you can set a regkey to play at a higher res apparently but I've not tried this). The processor gets a 4.7 while the memory gets a 4.5. I'm beginning to wonder what Microsoft's ideal machine must look like.
Vista itself ran quite smoothly. It seemed faster than XP on some fronts (thought it must be the effect of me having run XP for 3 years on a painfully slow machine). There were some glitches- for example, trying to play a video in vlc would cause glass to turn off for the duration of vlc being open. WMP seemed to have no such issues. Media player classic on the other hand would start off fine- you could play it with glass on, but if you went full screen and then came back, it would flicker and turn glass off.
Some of the other software I've tried include media monkey, firefox and bitcomet and they seem to run smoothly without issues. On a network performance end Vista seems tons faster- download speeds seem faster, and i can play movies from my old computer over a share without any choppiness during playback.
Anyway, that was my impressions- if people have installed vista on their machines I'd be interested to know what their feedback is, especially if they've got the hard disk and scroll issues fixed because thats beginning to annoy me.

Excellent - good to hear, my pre-RC1 build just downloaded yesterday so I was planning on installing it on a T60 today.

I don't put a lot of stock in the system ratings - i installed Beta 2 on a Z61t and it gave it a 1 rating mostly just because of the graphics which will run aero fine when Vista launches.

I think most of the hardware incompatibilities that I have seen on the ThinKPads I have tested have been down to Intel dragging its' feet with Vista drivers.

VLC is my media player of choice but it has always had some funky effects with the windows display (like playing a background video on any piece of black on the screen), i've been enjoying Media Player 11 though on my XP machines recently as its a really good interface imho.

I installed Vista on my T42. You can see my take on it here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=29529

I have the same issue with scrolling. I tried installing the UltraNav driver, but it was a no-go.

Windows update has a driver update for the Intel 2200BG wireless card that came installed on my T42. Wireless works fine for me.

On the preload, in c:\ibmtools\drivers\ in a folder whose name I forget there are XP drivers for the SATA drive that work under preRC1. You can find them by searching for "iastor."

For scrolling under Vista, I think we'll have to wait until after release when Lenovo modifies the trackpoint/ultranav driver.

Have you been able to get the fingerprint software to work?

WilsonF wrote:Have you been able to get the fingerprint software to work?

Myself, I don't have a fingerprint reader.

Me too has installed Vista RC1. Works perfectly. Even faster sometimes than XP. Unfortunately Internet Explorer works faster in Vista than Opera 9...(I'll write to Opera about that...it's very frustrating see Internet Explorer be so fast )

With the drivers...I let it be as it took much longer to install them than in XP and I tried the Software Installer for that, and the ATI driver said that I should revert to a VGA driver before installing it, I guess the vista driver was a bit too advanced for it to go over it, and mostly I miss the Power Manager and Driver...But so far the Thinkpad is plugged in so it is no problem.