Installing Win 7 on a t400

[albo]

Hi Folks,

I'm about to put a new drive (seagate momentus 500 GB 7400 rpm) into my t400 and install Win 7 Pro on it (I currently run XP). I've seen these "enhanced experience" ads Lenovo has put out, so I'm wondering if there's anything to that. If so, is there anything I can/should do to take advantage of that, or is a normal install as good as it's going to get?

Thanks folks!

allie

[Harryc]

Unless your T400 came from the factory with W7 loaded, you will not be able to take advantage of the Lenovo EE...it's on the factory preload only. So a normal install with Lenovo drivers is as close as you'll get.

[albo]

thanks harry. out of curiosity, do you know what they do differently on the preload to soup it up?

[Eudoxus]

I do not think that you should worry too much about lenovo optimizations as Windows 7 is quite fast anyway. At least as far as my setup goes I feel no need to optimize anything.

[albo]

@Eudoxus: I'm not worried, but I am curious. Speed, of course, is all relative.

[Harryc]

thanks harry. out of curiosity, do you know what they do differently on the preload to soup it up?

Read about it at the link below. Other than generalities discussed in that article, I've never seen exact step by step detail on what was tweaked and how. I am fairly certain that information is Lenovo proprietary information. They seem to be proud of the fact that their competition doesn't have 'EE', so I understand their reluctance to release details.
http://www.lenovo.com/news/us/en/2009/0 ... debut.html

[albo]

thanks again!

[madtownidiot]

I upgraded to windows 7 recently. It took several tries to get everything working right, but hopefully someone will read this and avoid my mistakes.
There are a few minor driver issues which can be solved by installing them BEFORE you go to Microsoft to update/activate your system. Specifically, the switchable graphics driver does not seem to work in windows 7. To update the driver for the ATI 3470HD, you have to set the BIOS to discrete graphics before you boot up windows. In order to get the fingerprint software to work, it also has to be installed before you update from Microsoft. The touchpad, display and chipset drivers have to be manually installed (instructions are available from the support website). Everything else seems to work well, if not better than it did with vista
Another thing I would strongly recommend is to copy the windows install disk to a USB flash drive and use that to install windows. Overall time will be cut by nearly a half hour when installing from USB and the extra step will eliminate the possibility of a few errors that sometimes show up after a DVD install. (the slightest movement while installing from a DVD seems to produce errors which don't make themselves apparent until after the install is finished)

[albo]

great tips, madtownidiot. thanks!

[Tony Chan]

I also fresh installed Windows 7 to my T400. I manually instlalled all drivers from Lenovo and it works really well except that my Intel 5300 now will only connect with my Linksys router in G speed. The same set of hardware in Vista connected in N speed without any problem.

Anyone have similar wireless issue(s)?

[davekung]

As far as I can tell (Bought Win 7 prof X86 Recovery DVD set just to check out the EE raved by Lenovo) and noticed that there was an extra partition created by the recovery DVD on T400 (I also received the win7 upgrade DVDs). So I have 3 partitions on the drive I'm running Win7. The extra partition (<2GB in size) at the beginning of the drive, followed by Win7 Partition, and the recovery service partition (10GB+) at the end. Did not really notice (by seat of my pants, and not with a timer) that it boots up significantly faster than my X61 Tablet with Win7 retail version, especially my T400 have 2GB turbo memory.

[zhenya]

I would encourage you to try and get the official Lenovo system restore cd's if at all possible, as I have never had 100% luck with getting everything working when installing from a retail disk on a Thinkpad. There are a number of places where it is important to install drivers in a particular order, yet no official documentation on this. On my z61t running Windows 7, everything basically works, but the Power Management is not 100%.

I think that even if you bought your T400 with Windows XP, you have a license for Windows 7. If you call Lenovo, they should sell you the system restore disks for a nominal charge.

[albo]

That's a great idea, Zhenya. However, I bought my t400 before Win 7 was out - my options were XP vs. Vista then.

I actually already have a copy of win 7 pro, since I have access to MSDNAA. So, even if I don't have a win7 number at lenovo, i wonder if i could use my own reg number with those disks. Win 7 install disks, apparently, are tied to particular reg numbers, but I've read there's a way around that by altering some file in the install disk. The only issue is getting a copy of those restore cd's. Has anyone here happen to have uploaded them anywhere? I don't know if that's 100% legal, so, please don't construe this as a request to do anything illegal.

UPDATE: Just got off the phone with lenovo, and no joy there since i bought my system back in january of 2009. win 7 is only available for those who bought their systems after June 26th or so. Now off to chat up my university IT department to see if I can get the discs from them...

[bill bolton]

I actually already have a copy of win 7 pro, since I have access to MSDNAA. So, even if I don't have a win7 number at lenovo, i wonder if i could use my own reg number with those disks.

If you mean the key that was supplied through the MSDNAA process..... yes, you can use that key (as long as it hasn't already been used).

I have never had problem with getting eveything functional on a ThinkPad by doing a clean install off generic Windows media, and then downloading and installing the relevant drivers and utilities from the IBM/Lenovo support site.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[ryan1212]

I cleanly installed W7, ran system update, ran windows update, and had absolutely no issues. I left the bios on switchable, etc. Everything installed and worked.

as far as "Lenovo EE", it sounds like most of it was just updated software and drivers, all of which can be obtained through system update. Every image is going to have some minor factory tweaks here and there, but I think it would be mostly the same, with the exception of the lenovo themes and desktop icons. (Can be copied over from a Vista preload though pretty simply, which I wrote a thread in the windows 7 forum)

[albo]

@ryan1212 - actually, if you look on lenovo's EE site, you'll see that their own version boots up, on average, 20% faster than a normally-installed win 7. Shutdown is 30% faster apparently, though their definition of "shutdown" is a bit sketchy. Still, sounds like it's a little more than just drivers.

[zhenya]

The primary problem I have had installing from a retail cd is getting the Power Manager to work fully. I've also had problems with the On Screen Display, but have been able to fix those. Every machine I've ever installed from a retail cd though has had issues with power manager, primarily the inability to choose profiles from the drop down menu, and to a lesser extent, problems displaying a consistent remaining battery life. It's a widely reported problem on forums all over the Internet, and I've seen many posts that claim to fix it, but have never succeeded. Not a major issue, and I think a lot of people would never even notice, but it's there nonetheless.

[Guz]

Question on Lenovo's EE: I just want to confirm, that if you run the recovery partition/DVD's, you still get the EE?

I ask this, because the first thing I did when I got my T400, was to run the recovery. Why? I wanted to make sure I could do this at a later date without any surprises.