Thinkpads Forum

I have a T60p currently running xp pro which qualified for a free Vista Business upgrade, which I finally received. Upon speaking with two Lenovo tech persons I have been advised to wait a year before upgrading to Vista for everyone to get their act together. Lenovo's website recommends xp pro over Vista on their new machines. I like the new look of Vista & wanted to know if it is advisable to upgrade to Vista & expect it to run smoothly.

Thanks in advance for your comments!

same here how vista run on T60?

It runs smoothly on a t60. This one came pre-installed with Vista so I've never run XP on this particular machine.

I'd say the choice of upgrading to Vista really depends on what software you use. Are you going to be using mostly office products and email? Then I'd say, "why wait, the waters fine."

If you are going to be using anything really beyond that I'd say to wait for 6 months to a year.

Well, actually I would wait for the first service pack for Vista and then upgrade to Vista. History has proven that Microsofts Operating Systems are not tested well enough.

Hamid wrote:Well, actually I would wait for the first service pack for Vista and then upgrade to Vista. History has proven that Microsofts Operating Systems are not tested well enough.

Oh, its been tested well enough, they just don't fix all the bugs they know they have beforehand. Probably over 10,000 people downloaded the betas and sent reports into Microsoft.

In my experience whish isn't too much if you have older stuff don't upgrade. If this is a system where everything is new it is not a problem.

Brad

I installed the retail boxed version of Vista Ultimate on my T60, and things have been running fairly smoothly so far. Many of the issues have to do more with my own unfamiliarity with Vista (compared to XP), and that I wanted to run as a non-privileged user with a separate admin account. Some apps assume that only one person is logged into a machine at any given time, and that user has full admin rights. That's obviously borne out of bad security practices in Windows' history, but I hope Vista will change this.

I started off with Vista 64-bit, but quickly backed down to 32-bit. You'll find that compatibility is much better in a 32-bit world. I don't have any need for a 64-bit OS on the T60 anyway... I installed more out of curiosity than anything else.

I use my T60 quite heavily every day now, with only a couple of lingering issues that may or may not be Vista-related. The ThinkVantage suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, cygwin, Photoshop, Lightroom, OpenOffice, etc. all run fine.

Brad wrote:In my experience whish isn't too much if you have older stuff don't upgrade. If this is a system where everything is new it is not a problem.
Brad

I have a feeling that is right on the money; I did a clean install with the upgrade disk, used to TVT SystemUpdate to get all the drivers, and haven't had a single problem-- granted I'm not bogged down with any "legacy" software, so to speak; contrary to what many have been saying about Vista, I actually think it's a great upgrade; a few minor annoyances in adapting to the new interface, etc., but overall I'm quite satisfied (the newly organized Start menu is enough for me, honestly);

Vista Ultimate is up and running on my T41P. I am typing this post from it right now.

With my recent upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of RAM, I noticed a big increase in system performance. Overall it's just tad slower than XP. All I have running is the battery software and keyboard customizer.

Overall I am very impressed with it. Except for the wireless speed issue which I suspect is more my Intel 2200BG card than anything else.

I am going to upgrade from this 1.7GHz Banias to a 2.16GHz Dothan shortly. I expect good things.

Considering my experience here on a slightly older machine I can only assume it be almost like butter on a T60 with discrete graphics.

I am running Vista Ultimate on my desktop and XP Pro on thinkpad. My initial thoughts were not to upgrade until a year when it becomes stable and accepted by most if not all but now I am sort of liking it alot.

Vista runs smoothly on T60 except some wireless issues as few gentlemen mentioned above.

Perhaps your wireless network performance issues are addressed here?

http://www.neillans.co.uk/?p=165

rhonig wrote:I have a T60p currently running xp pro which qualified for a free Vista Business upgrade ...

How did you qualify and how were you notified?

Does the battery life go down at all with VISTA?

if you're only interested in the new look of vista,there is no need upgrading to vista.An alternative way such as modify your XP theme will meet your need.

Rwang wrote:Does the battery life go down at all with VISTA?

It did in my experience. (It is possible that the search indexing or something was draining it more quickly than usual, since I didn't have Vista on there longer than a few days).

kkposh wrote:if you're only interested in the new look of vista,there is no need upgrading to vista.An alternative way such as modify your XP theme will meet your need.

The Vista transformation pack is weak. Explorer does not look like Vista's explorer. The sidebar is not customizable and as of version 5 couldn't use widgets from Microsoft's gallery.

I would suggest something maybe from Stardock and their Window Blinds product. There's a few good (although incomplete) Vista themes there as well.

It's been my experience with all of these themes (I have tried about a dozen before I upgraded to Vista), that none of them off the complete Vista shell. Icons are slightly off, the fonts don't look right, titlebars are too big or too little, etc.

I have yet to see a complete and total clone of the new interface.

have been using vista for about a week... was a separate clean install... programs work like they should in xp... however the power management seem to be much poorer in vista. the laptop runs cool in xp but when running vista everything somehow appears to be much warmer. if u are just interested in the new effects, i would say that u are better off staying with xp. the new effects just slow things down and eat ur battery life. idling in winxp with everything off display lowest brightness i was getting about 9watts. in vista, it was 12-14watts.. battery life does suffer quite a lot... even without aero..

I don't bother with upgrading to Vista, I am happy with XP, everything works now, so why upgrade?

If you don't mind reïnstalling xp in case things don't work out, why not just try vista?

I personally wouldn't buy vista now but wait until:
1) xp won't be enough anymore (which I don't expect to be soon), incompatible program's etc.
2) not everything is vista compatible (which is the case at this time)
But if I got it for free I think I would give it a go out of curiousity (wouldn't risk it however if I really needed the laptop for work or something).

Also keep in mind the disadvantages earlier posters wrote like less battery (in case they are important for you).
Looks are nice (I personally don't like the vista theme however), but it in the end, it just needs to get the job done.

the main problem i ran into with vista was that the norton corporate antivirus client had known compatibility issues, and i didn't want to run an OS like vista without antivirus

maybe there is a way around the compatibility issues, but i ran into a couple BSODs while installing various apps that worked fine on xp

xta wrote:the main problem i ran into with vista was that the norton corporate antivirus client had known compatibility issues, and i didn't want to run an OS like vista without antivirus<snip>

That, and a few VPN clients (the one I use among them).
I been in XP for years now, and really want to get to Vista, but I shall just be patient until the vendors catch up. ... JDH

My view of this is: Wait until SP1 at least, unless you really badly need a Vista feature. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

My TP60p came pre installed with Vista Business.

So far I have had several issues where I had to hard reboot and at least one BSOD. The BSOD was due to the parallel port driver but I have never used the port so I don't know why.

The majority of the programs I use installed fine although I had some issues where I had to do some non-standard installation steps to deal with the UAC.

All in all, at this point I think I would prefer XP. I have found nothing compelling to want me to like Vista over XP.

My final two cents: stay with XP.

---

Does anyone know if there is a way to get a set of XP recovery disks?

When my co-worker ordered a T60 two weeks ago (using the 15% off coupon, BTW), he would rather pay $30 more to get XP Pro than to get the default Vista Home Premium. I think he made a smart decision.

Just had another BSOD. This one was due to the Install(R) Pro/Wireless 3945ABG Network driver crashing when coming out of sleep.

pianowizard wrote:When my co-worker ordered a T60 two weeks ago (using the 15% off coupon, BTW), he would rather pay $30 more to get XP Pro than to get the default Vista Home Premium. I think he made a smart decision.

I too would pay $30 more for XP Pro than Home Premium.

Why?

I connect to domains.

I don't recommend it i installed windows vista ultimate on my T60 model 2007-VFE and it was crashing all the time so i went back to XP i think its better to wait for Vista's SP1 Vista is highly unstable at least with me it was.

As I stated befire, it runs pretty good on my T41P.

xta wrote:the main problem i ran into with vista was that the norton corporate antivirus client had known compatibility issues, and i didn't want to run an OS like vista without antivirus

IMHO you should use more recent build, I have three machines running Vista and NAV corp without any problems (at least there weren't any reports on that).

claudeo wrote:My view of this is: Wait until SP1 at least, unless you really badly need a Vista feature. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

I have a suspicion that there will be no services packs anymore, as updates will be rolled out more often through Microsoft Update.