Thinkpads Forum

I have a very well powered X61 (4gb RAM) and have struggled with Vista, especially sleep and reawake. I honestly don't have time to further muck with this, despite having spent lots of times doing various optimizations. My machine came with downgrade disks. I'm about to do it.

If you downgraded, has it been much better? is it worth it?

To XP? After trying Vista on T61 here for a week or two, I reinstalled XP from scratch and never looked back.

Longer battery runtime, perfect application support, hard drive actually goes to sleep and in general runs smoother.

I've had vista on my X61T since I've gotten it, and after a few tweaks, and upping the ram I've gotten used to it.
I'll be interested to since once SP1 goes final, and I install it to see any other changes in terms of speed.

The question today is a bit difficult. On one hand, I am still using XP Pro machines because Vista remains problematic on some issues. However, on the other hand, Vista will come, and I am hoping to move to Vista in 2008, so if you can work out your problems, it will probably be better to stay with Vista. ... JDH

I downgraded to XP Pro some months ago. I made an image of my installation, formatted and went back to Vista Business again.

Everything worked flawlessly in XP, but the reason I went back to Vista was basically a prettier GUI and a more smooth "feeling". There have been a few minor hickups with Vista every now and then, but not significant enough to make me go XP.

The feature I appreciate the most about Vista is Superfetch and its RAM caching. Since I multitask a lot I like the instant load times.

A long story short: XP for stability and generally faster performance (yet to try out Vista SP1 RC though). Vista for nicer and more modern GUI, memory management, and some nice standard functions such as i.e. Administrative Tools.

I bit the bullet today and am almost done with my rebuild. It is soooo much faster. Night and day. Boot is very quick too.

Just a note for all the people who do re-installs and re-builds and say it is faster than before: In a lot of cases, it is due in large part to getting rid of cache and temporary files and such like. That stuff can kill a machine. I can make a machine work vastly faster than before just by deleting junk (and I do NOT mean applications).

I am not telling people what they should and should run, merely suggesting calm judgement in what really happens when they re-build. ... JDH

I can assure you that the machine was very clean "gunk" wise. I had it for less than a month, and also went through the process of following a lot of folks good advice (much it from these forums) regarding how to optimize Vista to make it usable (and yes I turned off Aero). I am a great fan of CCleaner, and ran it often to clean out various remnants.

I am by no means a Microsoft basher. I dumped Vista because I have a business to run, and invested a significant amount of time trying to tame an OS that should have run properly out of the box. I kept hoping that I could get the machine to properly sleep, dock, undock, etc... How many times does one pop the battery before they give up?

I knew when I bought with Vista I was taking a chance, but I wanted to experience this for myself and decide. I honestly pity the poor consumer without technical skills who comes home with Vista.

I paid a lot of money for my X61 and it is very well equipped. I believe it unconscionable that Microsoft had the nerve to release this product given its significant flaws. I have no doubt that they will fix a lot of this, but fundamentally, a well tuned XP machine can run circles around Vista.

kennyschiff, actually Vista should run as fast or even faster than XP (depending on what you do) if you have more than 2GB Ram. If not, this indicates that some of your configuration is "suboptimal" as jdhurst noted.

I went into the Vista thing eyes wide open. I spent the 4 weeks that I had Vista researching how to get it to run right. I truly wanted it to work, and read these board carefully and followed through on various optimizations.

I have now had XP on this machine for 3 weeks and the biggest difference is that I'm not spending any time trying to optimize my machine or figure out how to get it to run better. It just works.

And while Vista "should run as fast or faster," in my experience it did not.

I agree that new UI is interesting and pretty, but there's much not right about the Vista OS yet.

For those considering downgrading to XP, I again re-endorse my decision. XP on my X61 flies and is stable.

I had vista on my T 60 which had some issues and in the end completely crashed my computer so I had to start from scratch. I redid the system with XP and have no problems what so ever.

I'm running Vista x64 on my x61s with no problems. I have 4GB RAM now, but even with 2GB it was fine. Just modify indexing so that it only indexes your start menu (control panels: indexing something), and don't bother with silly Readyboost (buy more RAM instead - it's cheap).

Lenovo support for Vista x64 is great. In fact, in some ways it's better. On XP my access manager would constantly crash, and I had other problems like the battery gauge would disappear after a while (would only come back after a reboot). The power manager has more options because Vista power management is better - more control. As for battery life, that's around the same too after turning off indexing. Still can get 6 hours. It's definitely faster, and even though I hear XP x64 runs ok on the x61s, it'll never be as well supported as Vista x64 (I want/need a 64-bit OS).

BTW - I realize my problems with Lenovo tools on XP are probably Lenovo's fault. Even so, whatever the cause, in the end I had problems.

downgraded to xp tablet 2005, then sidegraded (?) to xp64. no complaints here. then again I'm the kinda guy that still prefers 2000 to xp.

may give vista another try after sp2, but not before.

I downgraded for $50, I'm happy with XP and so is the gear that Vista couldn't see.

happy with XP, less power consumption