A31 and Windows 7?

[luke4010]

I have a Thinkpad A31, upgraded from a 1.6 to a 2.2ghz P4m, and 2GB ram. I've read posts on other websites that it is possible to install Windows 7 32-BIT on an A31. On my two attempts, Windows 7 will install error-free, and I've even had the chance to install the driver for the audio. But the next time I restart it, and every other attempt to boot onto 7, I get a blue-screen with a 0X0000 etc... code that according to Google, the Thinkpad's BIOS is not ACPI compliant with the operating system. I am running the latest BIOS (1GET41WW 1.13). I don't understand how other people are installing Windows 7 error free on their Thinkpads, (I've even seen a youtube video of somebody installing 7 on a very old PII Thinkpad that was definitely older than my A31.) So basically my question is is it possible to install Windows 7 on my Thinkpad A31, and if so, how? Only reason I really want to put 7 on this is because Microsoft is ending support on XP soon, and I am definitely NOT putting Vista on it, haha. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

While it certainly is possible to install W7 on an A3x series ThinkPad - been there and done that while it was still in the RC stage - it is definitely a very bad idea as well.

There is no graphics driver for ATi GPUs of this vintage that is supported by Vista/W7 and the lack of it will make the use of this machine in the said environment nothing short of painful. Not to mention that the CPU can barely deal with Flash in XP, let alone anything newer.

These laptops are over a decade old now. Move to a light Linux or keep on running XP.

Good luck.

[Saucey]

I had also did an install of Win7 SP1 and it took such a long time to do so.
It had booted, I turned off aero settings but it was still in the same boat as XP.
But after awhile it just didn't feel right. Went back to XP and worked fine.
There are driver issues, I think battery maximizer doesn't work for Win7, only on XP.

Welcome to the Forum!

I didn't get the error that you mentioned but I am not sure if I installed updates on the unit.

[dr_st]

I have Win7 installed on my X32, alongside XP. The absence of a graphics driver was very painful. It took me a very long time to get things to sort of work (including Power Manager), but still there are some things that just don't work, like Win+P/Fn+F7 for multiple display management, certain power schemes, etc. Plus the laptop often freezes when entering/exiting standby, or going from docked to undocked / vice-versa. Nothing like this ever happens on XP.

My expectation is, as George said, that on an A31 it would be even worse.

Your silly remark "definitely not putting Vista on it" is just that - silly. Vista is a fine operating system, and if I had any reason to believe that it will work well on your laptop, I'd advise you to use it. However, whatever problems you will face with Win7 you are likely to face with Vista, as it's basically the same OS, and there will be no drivers for it either.

[jronald]

For what its worth, I put Vista on my Z61t and hated it. Never had anything but issues. On a fluke I load W7, and was very pleasantly surprised. Most things work out of the box, and while I would never pay retail, the $60 I paid for a legit copy of Ultimate was worth it.

Ron

[pianowizard]

I can understand hating Vista back in 2006 (when people were playing with beta versions), 2007 or even 2008, because lots of hardware drivers were buggy, and because Vista had its own performance issues. But eventually all these drivers were fixed, and the mid 2009 release of Service Pack 2 nearly perfected the OS itself in terms of both performance and reliability. Criticizing or mocking Vista now, in 2014, only exposes one's ignorance. I have used all versions of Windows in the past 20 years, on a huge number of computers, and post-2009 Vista has proven to be one of the two most reliable versions, with the other being 8. (If I must choose between the two, I'd say 8 seems to be marginally more reliable than Vista, with the caveat that I have used 8 on only two computers, and for only about a year.) IMO, XP and 7 are the two most overrated versions.

That being said, it is my experience that on Pentium M and older machines, 7 does run noticeably faster than Vista. For example, I had 7 on my Dell Latitude D810 (2.13GHz Pentium M, 2GB PC2-5300 RAM, 100GB IDE HDD) for several weeks and it felt quite snappy for most basic applications. Then I discovered a 7-related glitch and was forced to downgrade to Vista. That glitch disappeared, which didn't surprise me because I already knew Vista was more reliable than 7, but now things feel a tad slower, like folders taking an extra split second to open, and the OS taking a couple seconds longer to start up.

[luke4010]

Thanks for all the replies.
As of now I am writing this with my A31 now successfully running Windows 7. The copy of 7 I was using was a bootleg I acquired from a friend, and after downloading and burning an .iso from microsoft of Windows 7 Home Premium, I swapped my 60GB drive for a 12GB drive from my old dead A21m and installed it, so if it didn't work or I end up not liking it, I can swap my 60GB with XP again without re-installing it. I was able to install all drivers, as it wanted the drivers for audio, chipset, power management, and the ATI video. It has been running as good as xp was, if not a little faster. XP would usually be using about 1500mb of RAM with just web browsing, and so far, 7 has not exceeded 1GB. Everything seems to work fine, even the keyboard shortcuts like FN+F4 to sleep. Only one problem. When I try to install Silverlight, (Netflix uses this, and it worked flawlessly playing video in HQ in full screen, waaayyy better than Flash) it crashes and bluescreens. I get a 0X00000050 error, and the ati3duag.dll file. I imagine it is crashing from the ATI driver not being compatible with Win7. Since I know this can't be fixed and will only probably get worse with other programs, I think what I'll do is just put the 60GB with XP back in and use that untill I get my hands on a newer Thinkpad, and retire this one. Side-note: It is true what everybody says about the sound on these things - Amazing to say the least.

Now, about Vista. I don't hate it and never said that. I've used it for about a year before and after using 7 now for the past two years on my Lenovo Ideacentre, I just personally like Windows 7 better and think it's a more stable OS.

Thanks all for the input. Now I'm off to try to revive the old Thinkpad A21m with the blinking power light of death!

[dr_st]

I have used all versions of Windows in the past 20 years, on a huge number of computers, and post-2009 Vista has proven to be one of the two most reliable versions, with the other being 8.

My primary desktop running Vista has indeed been very stable in the 5+ years of its existence. Once some early issues caused by faulty drivers (non-MS drivers for that matter) were eliminated, the machine virtually never crashes (except when the motherboard suddenly loses its SATA controller, which started happening recently due to the hardware age), and the only serious issue I remember which took a while to debug was due to me messing with some permissions of system files to achieve something, and then forgetting about what I did when it turned out that it cause problems elsewhere.

One of these days however I expect to have a personal machine running Win7 on hardware that's actually designed for it. I expect it will be this recently-acquired X220, once I finish setting it up. Up until now my experience with Win7 has been limited to: corporate laptop, desktop in parents' house which constantly gets infected with malware/crapware due to their usage habits and internet ignorance, and this X32 which was never designed for it. Thus, I am unable to assess the stability of the OS itself, independently of other, inherently instability-inducing factors.

That being said, it is my experience that on Pentium M and older machines, 7 does run noticeably faster than Vista. For example, I had 7 on my Dell Latitude D810 (2.13GHz Pentium M, 2GB PC2-5300 RAM, 100GB IDE HDD) for several weeks and it felt quite snappy for most basic applications. Then I discovered a 7-related glitch and was forced to downgrade to Vista. That glitch disappeared, which didn't surprise me because I already knew Vista was more reliable than 7, but now things feel a tad slower, like folders taking an extra split second to open, and the OS taking a couple seconds longer to start up.

These two things you mentioned (OS responsiveness in UI operations and startup time) were among the two performance-related improvements specifically introduced to Win7, so it's not surprising.

[Saucey]

Hmmmm... Maybe I'll reinstall Win7 on the A31P, this silverlight thing is interesting. It might work on an older silverlght version.
It would make a sweet Netflix box... even if it is old.

[A31]

Good to hear you got Windows 7 working on your A31. I used to own an A31 and I kept XP on it most of the time. I had Vista on it for a very short period of time (I think it was a couple of days). It ran very slowly so in the end I put XP back on. Never tried 7 on it.

May as well throw my opinion on Vista in here: it is not a bad OS - once you have SP2 installed. But really, Windows 7 and 8 are superior to it. I'd never use it as a primary OS these days. I still have a copy of Ultimate x64 running in VMware, but only really because it happens to have IE9 on it and being a web developer, it's handy to test your sites on a variety of browsers. This is also the reason why I still have a VM of Windows 2000 with IE6 and a VM of XP with IE7 kicking around.

You'd all throw rocks at me if I made my opinions on Windows 2000 public. I know that (for some strange reason) you lot love it like it's your child, so I'll keep my opinions to myself on that one.

[Cigarguy]

Being a tech geek, I'm a fairly early adopter of new tech. In the case of Vista, an adopter and have hated it ever since. Microsoft, like most tech company, relies on the consumer to also be their product testers. IMO, Vista until SP 2 was a beta version. Once the bug was ironed out, MS simply called it Win 7 and made a bunch more $$ selling Win 7 to people who couldn't get away from Vista quick enough. Some tech savy folks realized the two OS was essentially, though not 100%, the same and stuck with Vista while the masses spent the $$.

[luke4010]

Hmmmm... Maybe I'll reinstall Win7 on the A31P, this silverlight thing is interesting. It might work on an older silverlght version.
It would make a sweet Netflix box... even if it is old.

Aside from medium web browsing, I use netflix alot on my A31 in XP. Video quality is always at least 480p and sounds amazing too! CPU usage when watching a video through silverlight for me is around 50-70%, so obviously better than any flash video.

[pianowizard]

Being a tech geek, I'm a fairly early adopter of new tech. In the case of Vista, an adopter and have hated it ever since.

I too was a very early adaptor, and so I HATED Vista from 2006 through early 2010, when I accidentally had a chance to use SP2 and my attitude toward Vista made a 180-degree change.

Microsoft, like most tech company, relies on the consumer to also be their product testers. IMO, Vista until SP 2 was a beta version. Once the bug was ironed out, MS simply called it Win 7 and made a bunch more $$ selling Win 7 to people who couldn't get away from Vista quick enough.

In general I do like Microsoft, but here I totally agree with you. Windows "7" is technically just Windows 6.1, and Vista is 6.0. It is a really bad case of false advertising.

[dr_st]

You call it false advertising, but I think it's just marketing. Rebranding is a very common technique when dealing with a product that started badly and got lots of ill fame, but now is basically OK. Vista/Win7 is the classic example, and I don't see anything illegitimate in that.

To Microsoft's credit, they did improve Vista, and did backport some of the features from Win7 to Vista. Someone with an existing Vista license did not HAVE to shell out extra cash to get a stable, "non-beta" OS. That is, if he was techy enough to look beyond the brand, and understand what you and I understood during the post-Vista-SP1 period.

[Saucey]

I'm unsure of what I did on my A31p that I had running, but after a disassembly and cleaning the wifi and sound was shot on the Windows 7 installation I had on it.
It said it couldn't find the hardware or drivers, my guess is that I had updated it and it went away under my nose. Odd thing was that, I couldn't restore it from an earlier update.
I thought the sound board died, which would of been very tragic, and that the Wifi just died on it as well.

But when taking out one of the ultrabays while running the unit didn't like it and started beeping like a madman.
So I figured it didn't went out after all.
I tried to install eOS on it, but it didn't get past the first welcome screen.
Slapped Linux Mint (ver. 16?) w/ the Mate desktop, works like a charm.
Temps are at 50*C w/ a few tabs open on Midori, highest it is 58*C.

I think that, after I had installed the Ultrabay Numeric Keypad, the drivers went haywire after a restart.
But with Linux I am able to listen to a music stream @256kbps without studder from the Win7. But the CPU is running up at 90% hehe.
The keypad doesnt work but without the numberlock on so far... If I were to sell this unit I'd probably just install WinXP SP3, shouldn't have any problems then.


Oh and amplifying the speakers is great, something I was missing on the old Xubuntu I was running.