Procedure to downgrade X61s to windows XP?
Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 9:25 am
I posted a thread on notebookreview with all the pictures of my x61s, but it got lost in a sea of threads regarding its larger brethren.
Yesterday I began migrating my files from my older(3 month old Toshiba w/a celeron M430 1.7ghz, faster hard drive, and 1gb of memory) and ran the recovery cd to put a fresh factory installed state on the machine. The machine had came with vista, but I could not believe how slow it was operating - I had even doubled the installed ram. I ended up reinstalling XP since the machine was barely usable - windows vista had rated it a 2.0 due to horrible graphics performance.
That has me thinking about what amount of performance (and battery) is wasted on my X61s. I would like to attempt to install windows xp, but there is some trouble with this:
It didn't come with a recovery cd, just a hidden partition. Then there's the issue of drivers and then IBM utilities. I'd assume the power utilities are available, but what about keyboard function keys, hard drive shock protection and so on? I recall reading that some of the foreign websites offer the x-series with XP.
What steps would be preferable?
Here is my plan so far:
1) Get a fairly large external usb drive
2) Clone/ghost the factory drive
3) Disable onboard hard drive to ensure external drive behaves normally
4) compress or reghost factory drive and split into smaller, burnable dvd images
5) ....
from here I'm unsure where to go, should I wipe the drive completely or everything except the recovery partition?
I don't have a spare 2.5" drive laying around, although I could use my other notebooks drive for a short while to see how it goes.
Is there someone braver than me out there - usually I'd have no problem wiping and reinstalling to my hearts content, but that was with less "professional" hardware.
Yesterday I began migrating my files from my older(3 month old Toshiba w/a celeron M430 1.7ghz, faster hard drive, and 1gb of memory) and ran the recovery cd to put a fresh factory installed state on the machine. The machine had came with vista, but I could not believe how slow it was operating - I had even doubled the installed ram. I ended up reinstalling XP since the machine was barely usable - windows vista had rated it a 2.0 due to horrible graphics performance.
That has me thinking about what amount of performance (and battery) is wasted on my X61s. I would like to attempt to install windows xp, but there is some trouble with this:
It didn't come with a recovery cd, just a hidden partition. Then there's the issue of drivers and then IBM utilities. I'd assume the power utilities are available, but what about keyboard function keys, hard drive shock protection and so on? I recall reading that some of the foreign websites offer the x-series with XP.
What steps would be preferable?
Here is my plan so far:
1) Get a fairly large external usb drive
2) Clone/ghost the factory drive
3) Disable onboard hard drive to ensure external drive behaves normally
4) compress or reghost factory drive and split into smaller, burnable dvd images
5) ....
from here I'm unsure where to go, should I wipe the drive completely or everything except the recovery partition?
I don't have a spare 2.5" drive laying around, although I could use my other notebooks drive for a short while to see how it goes.
Is there someone braver than me out there - usually I'd have no problem wiping and reinstalling to my hearts content, but that was with less "professional" hardware.