I wanna upgrade to Vista Ultimate - what about ThinkVantage?

[dustee]

My x301 came bundled with the Vista Business but I would like to upgrade to Ultimate. My question: how do I re-install the ThinkVantage applications and other Thinkpad-related stuff once the upgrade is done? And what is the best way to have drivers handy once the upgrade requires them?

[elvair]

I havent done this myself, and hence maybe not the best person to comment on that, however my general understanding of the matter is such that you should go to lenovo website, get thinkvantage system update utility, then run it and it should install everything else for you (in fact you should be able to choose what exactly do you need, or just install everything that it offers you to). In addition I understand that you will not be able to create recovery media though, which is great shame in my opinion, because having that isolated partition in your system is very handy in my opinion. Licencing wise you should have no problems at all with making that recovery media.

In fact I think the best thing to do would be to allow you to choose yourself what is it you want in your recovery bundle, so that lenovo would only provide framework for creation of that recovery partition. However I guess that would not be possible in any foresseable future.

I hope that helps !

[NJ_Dave]

I haven't done this either, but I would think Windows "Anytime Upgrade" would be the most pain-free way to go from Business to Ultimate. All the ThinkPad drivers and utilities would just stay put. Of course if you're currently running 32-bit Business, you can only upgrade to 32-bit Ultimate, not 64-bit Ultimate.

As far as I know, System Update will only get you the latest ThinkPad drivers; it won't upgrade your Windows version. I don't know if there's a way to upgrade through Lenovo at all -- the Windows EULA seems to weld a particular Windows release to each laptop. As a Lenovo tech told me when I requested a way to make my 32-bit Business laptop run 64-bit Business: "We don't upgrade, we only downgrade."

[elvair]

[quote="NJ_Dave"] "We don't upgrade, we only downgrade."[/quote]

and of course we have clearly seen that after Lenovo acquired notebook business from IBM