x201s with Windows 10

[X20055]

Greetings, I am wondering is it good to try to install Windows 10 on my x201s. I know people tried back in 2015 with very mixed results but as time passed, Windows 10 changed by much and I do wonder was it good or bad change when relating to old ThinkPads. I do have one with i7-620LM CPU, 8GB DDR3 and 1440 display. Beside system itself and stability/compatibility I am also interested on how software performs and what things are and are not supported. Examples - all Lenovo softwares; tpfancontrol; wifi.

I might add I am interested in results of Windows 10 on all series, x200/201/s/etc.

[Ryccardo]

Hotkeys: download and extract the 3.81.01 version (https://support.lenovo.com/it/en/downloads/ds014985 - scroll down!), enable Win7 compatibility on setup.exe, install "On Screen Display" only. Wireless card power settings will NOT save across reboots...

Power Manager: download and extract latest version, duplicate setup.exe as (for example) setup1.exe, enable Win7 compatibility on setup1.exe, install otherwise normally

Wifi: should work fine out of the box on the most-common-stock Intel 6x00s (unlike last gen's Intel 4xxx, which are unstable on 8 and up)

Trackpoint(-only) driver - not Ultranav: scrolling will not work on most Metro/UWP controls, including Start - not even with the usual trick of editing tp4table.dat; so download the Win10 Ultranav driver and force install it over the "built-in PS/2 mouse", it will work fine... that is, until W10 decides to spontaneously replace it with the "correct" one!

[X20055]

Thanks, did you try with latest updates? 1803? Does it ever produce any errors or cause any issues during normal daily use? Is it power efficient(compared to Windows 7 or Linux)?

[Ryccardo]

No, I mainly used LTSB (1604 ?) on the T61... and not for much, in part because of the constant tweaking and updating needed, but also because I dislike the new UI with barely 3 on-screen colors at any time

I do have a NEC tablet (Atom Z3736F Cherry trail/2GB/64GB) I use occasionally with the newest version of 10, and subjective performance (speed versus bugs/stability) hasn't changed much in the past 2 years, for what I've experienced...

[X20055]

AFAIK colors can be adjusted but hidden Windows 10 features are real pain(system changes itself in background without notifying, also services can be doing heavy work in background drawing lot of batter power). Do you think that Windows 7 or 8.1 is still better for x201s than Windows 10?

[Ryccardo]

I would think so: 7 (and Vista) are what the X201 series was designed for (and rarely if ever do major upgrades of commercial OSes improve the overall experience for older users, in my opinion)...

while 8, despite still having the same driver limitations I described above, introduced interesting changes: built-in fingerprint scanner support - much better than Lenovo/Authentec's, full SSD trimming support, a better built-in backup utility [though nothing really matches good old copy and paste, when it comes to cross-platform restoring], you only need Metro apps only once (the new control panel - to program the fingerprint scanner ) and everything else can be done with the "conventional" UI, ...

10 is/was trying to be competitive, especially in the form of making Win32 and Metro/UWP not feel like completely separate technologies, and slowly completing transition to The New Way; however they're clearly showing more disregard than ever for consumers' freedom (worth noting that the only fully administrable versions, even then with some limitations compared to its predecessors, are Enterprise and Education -which is a rebranded Enterprise-, which most common people can only pirate; then there was the entire free update fiasco, and their attempt to retroactively add arbitrary CPU restrictions to 7 and 8, and built-in adware like "Get Office" and "Phone Connection", making the wifi icon on the taskbar outright lie by showing full bars in some versions...)


(While it's "too old" for X201, I'm running XP on the T61, and it's amazing how faster and less intrusive it is compared to all its successors! Too bad I have to choose between the 4 GB RAM patch or the Broadcom video accelerator )

[X20055]

Interesting. So it seems that Linux is the only proper way these days. As for Windows 10 Enterprise, there's LTSC update channel that possibly is best for x200/201/s laptops, sadly as you said it's legally not available to end-user.

[Dekks]

Run linux with 8GB RAM then VM windows...

[X20055]

I have tried Windows 10 x64 1803 for my x201s, it didn't go well.

Everything from Windows side installed nicely but literally no Lenovo software installs properly. I can get setup to running for most programs and they seem to reside in "Program Files" and are on program list listed as installed but they simply don't do anything - don't work. Windows 10 has built-in substitutes for certain functions but those are obviously poorly implemented and not even close to what was offered by Lenovo(mainly OSD and Power Manager).

Additionally Joulemeter is not working so I can't even measure battery power usage. Visual Studio alternative proposed by Microsoft is few GB's compared to 2MB of Joulemeter.

[X20055]

Does anyone know is it possible to get 15-scale brightness adjustment like with older Windows? Windows 10 only allows it own 10-scale adjustment which is actually 7-scale as it duplicates few times.

[X20055]

The next issue is lack of ability to enable Hyper-V in Windows 10. Those options are greyed out, some people claim that disabling TPM or other options should make it work but then what if you want both Hyper-V and TPM? And disabling TPM or any other option in BIOS didn't help in my case(i7-620LM).