Thinkpads Forum

More observations as of sep 18 2011:
- performance with an older 160 gig, 7200 rpm hard drive instead of a solid state drive is pretty good. About 80% as fast as the SSD. Boot up is around 25 seconds with the mechanical drive.
-TPFancontrol runs very well on the T60 with Windows 8. The cooling fan spins up a lot, and temperatures increase. There might be some sort of CPU limiting adjustment within the Maintenance applet, but I have not looked for it yet.
-Fingerprint security works just dandy, with no trouble enrolling fingerprints.

further notes since this post:
- the 60 gig Callisto brand ssd would not format properly using Win 8 install. But..I was able to format it using a Win 7 install USB. Then I halted Win 7 install and went back to Win 8. It seems to be an oddity with that drive only. An Intel 80 gig behaved properly.
I had bought this cheapie Callisto just for Windows 8. I guess there's something in the firmware, or perhaps the drive has a flaw. But, I'm running now.

-My W500 would drop all video unexpectedly just after installing Win 8 on it. Then, I disabled switchable graphics in BIOS and it worked. Display Port out for an external monitor would not work. VGA video out to an external monitor worked well, however.

Yep...it works. Fast and stable. There's a bit of a learning curve, but good old "How-to-Geek" has really a good article on what to do.

My only failure is not being able to connect to an external monitor. My guess is the lack of ATI drivers and things. ATI informed me that it can't talk to my operating system. (gee, I wonder why, eh?)

The external monitor will work, but the scaling is off a bit, and it's not real clean or sharp.

Cold boot is 15 seconds on a solid state hard drive. Many Lenovo utilities will run in Windows 8. Lenovo's System Update will not run. Says I have the wrong OS.

I may install MS Office 2010 on it, and see how that goes. Shouldn't be any "surprises", I wouldn't think...

My user account is the same as my "Windows Live" account. Not sure what MS indents to do with that setup. I have not tried creating a Standard User account yet...

Ah, interesting my OCZ 60Gb Vertex2 wouldn't format either - I had to switch it to IDE mode rather than AHCI (and then back again on the first reboot)

mgo wrote:Many Lenovo utilities will run in Windows 8. Lenovo's System Update will not run. Says I have the wrong OS.

Out of curiosity - run the commands ver or winver. What do they report?

(Out of curiosity - run the commands ver or winver. What do they report?)

I cannot answer that because I have already removed Windows 8 from the ThinkPad I was using. I had other things to do with it.

Another main reason to stop using Windows 8; it would not run with an external monitor, and my 72 year old eyes pretty much demand a larger external monitor when working all day.

I'll put Windows 8 back on a machine when it goes to Beta. Most likely, by then ATI and other video drivers will be available for an external monitor.

I'll probably never run Windows 8 on a touch screen computer, but I am impressed with the speed of the new prototype operating system. Seems even faster than Windows 7 which is mighty quick, especially with a solid state hard drive. So, it looks like a good candidate using the traditional desktop interface. A simple registry hack gets rid of the Metro interface, even on the current Developer's release: from Howto Geek -

" •If you want to disable Metro UI entirely, you can open up the registry editor and change the value of RPEnabled to 0 instead of 1 at the following key: (via NeoWin)"

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\