Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I purchased a T400 from Lenovo 2 1/2 years ago and had them "downgrade" to Windows XP. Although they send the Vista disks, the partition has XP.

My desktop runs Win 7 64-bit and I think the OS is great.

Is there and upside to formatting my Thinkpad T400 and doing a full install of Win 7? I want to move the laptop up to the spare in my office as the official backup up computer.

Is it worth the effort of will I just be wasting time?

Thank you

Elliot

If you like it, use it.
Performance-wise, they're about the same overall.

If you have switchable graphics, then you should definitely go to Windows 7 and turn on switchable graphics for maximum battery life and performance.

elazarus wrote:I purchased a T400 from Lenovo 2 1/2 years ago and had them "downgrade" to Windows XP. Although they send the Vista disks, the partition has XP.

Give Vista a try. Vista was terrible when it first came out, but after Service Pack 2, it has improved significantly and now I actually prefer it over both XP and 7.

There should be a vista license on the bottom of the laptop, so you can "upgrade" to vista for free. You have the disks, I would install vista (and all updates) before judging it - as pianowizard said, vista sp2 is almost equivelent to 7 and xp, and in my tests, that seems about accurate - I upgraded to 7 a couple of weeks ago, and while it is nice, it performs almost identically to vista sp2 overall, especailly with IE9 and gpu acceleration, and IMHO unless you can get a good price on the upgrade to windows 7 (mine was 40$), it is not really worth the upgrade effort and cost.

Thanks for replying......

Sure, installing Vista would save me $200......and, yes I have the disk.

Is there one place where I can download the Entire ThinkVantage package so I do not have to do it one file at a time?

Elliot

elazarus wrote:Is there one place where I can download the Entire ThinkVantage package so I do not have to do it one file at a time?

Download and install System Update. It will show you all packages from Lenovo applicable to your machine/OS and let you choose what you want. Then it will download and install them.

Note that the Vista discs you got with the laptop already contain Lenovo software.

The software and drivers will likely be way outdated on Vista recovery media. Best to run System Update anyway.

I recently upgraded my T400 to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (from XP 32 bit), an Intel 320 SSD and 8G of memory. I am very pleased with the performance and battery life which now exceeds 6 hours using the Intel graphics, so much so that I decided not to buy a new laptop and keep this one for another year or so.

Bruce

elazarus wrote:Hi,

I purchased a T400 from Lenovo 2 1/2 years ago and had them "downgrade" to Windows XP. Although they send the Vista disks, the partition has XP.

My desktop runs Win 7 64-bit and I think the OS is great.

Is there and upside to formatting my Thinkpad T400 and doing a full install of Win 7? I want to move the laptop up to the spare in my office as the official backup up computer.

Is it worth the effort of will I just be wasting time?

Thank you

Elliot

If you have at least 1gb of RAM win7 performs noticeably better than XP on the same hardware. I've upgraded a couple of older machines and was surprised at the improvement. Not an enormous amount when it comes down to crunching data; that's not going to change. But the user experience was a bit snappier in enough places to notice. But do not bother if you don't have at least 1gb of RAM.

The only stumbling block is drivers. Some older laptops won't have all the necessary drivers to work on Win7. In some cases the generic OS driver will work, but usually by sacrificing custom features like non-standard resolutions. There are also work-arounds to get Vista drivers loaded. But for as recent a model as a T400 it shouldn't be an issue.

elazarus wrote:Is it worth the effort of will I just be wasting time?

Its definitely worth the effort for a T400!

Cheers,

Bill B.