Thinkpads Forum

I am planning to replace the laptop I use as my personal machine. The new machine is a T61p with vista ultimate. I am less familiar with the "enhancements" that Lenovo provides with vista, since I have been using XP machines. What stuff should I get rid of?

richk wrote:I am planning to replace the laptop I use as my personal machine. The new machine is a T61p with vista ultimate. I am less familiar with the "enhancements" that Lenovo provides with vista, since I have been using XP machines. What stuff should I get rid of?

Your headline mentioned "Vista" bloatware, but the body of your post said Lenovo features. Assuming you meant the Lenovo features, you can delete the same ones that you removed with XP. Lenovo provides pretty much the same features with Vista as it does with XP. A couple of features are not supported in Vista, so they do not appear in the offerings.

To help you to decide what to remove you can always go to the Lenovo site for your machine and look at the offerings.

As with XP, Vista will require some simple performance tweaks to maximize speed. Vista SP1 has helped to make Vista a bit better.

I'd argue that the free Diskeeper software is bloatware. It doesn't work very quickly OR very well, either get rid of it or replace it with a real defragmenter.

Some of the Lenovo helpers (like managing networks & wireless) seem less able than the counterparts that are in Vista. I think Lenovo got leapfrogged as MS released better tools in these areas.

Then again...if there's nothing you find compelling about the entire lenovo rescue/recovery partition--that's a major hit. Vista has new recovery tools that you actually can't use with an OEM installation. Supposedly you can do an installation from a retail disc, using the product key for your Thinkpad. (Which will only work on your Thinkpad, of course.)