ThinkPad R40 Vista Install

[R40_user]

I just installed Vista Business on my
Thinkpad R40 and I spent the last two
days testing it and getting all the
drivers on it.

It reminded me of when I upgraded my Dell CP
series from Windows 98 to Windows XP. I had some
similar issues.

All and all I think I did a great job
of getting it all working and I have to
say Vista has been working pretty well so
far. My R40 has a Pentium 4M 2.4Ghz
processor and I've upped the RAM to
1.5GB. I also have a 100GB hard drive.

Here are the steps I took to get it all
working.

Vista on IBM R40 Thinkpad
(clean install)

Vista automatically installed the
drivers for the modem, the sound card and the
ehernet card which seem to work okay.

Three down.

My R40 has the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (32MB)
video card. This should work on any R40.
There are no Vista drivers for the ATI
Radeon 7500. What you have to do is
manually assign the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000
drivers. That will get the video to work.

My R40 does not have the built in bluetooth
adapter so I don't know about those drivers.

I do have the built in Wifi adapter. Its the
Atheros Dual-Band 802.11ab and 802.11abg
wireless LAN Mini-PCI adapter. I installed the
drivers from Lenovo Support and Downloads for
Windows XP and installed it. Worked like a charm.

I also installed the HotKey Features for
Windows XP from their website which enabled
the function key and the volume/mute buttons.

There is one item in the device manager that
has a bang on it but I cannot determine what
it is. It's probably some Windows driver for
plug and play or some other thing that's not
a huge deal.

I ran Driver Detective on the laptop and
other than it complaining about using standard
Windows drivers for the ethernet card and
what have you, it could not find anything a driver
wasn't assigned to. Do I want to pay then $29.00
to download the "best" versions of those drivers?
Not today!

I hope this helps anyone thinking of upgrading
to Vista. Since I am in the IT field, I need to
get aquianted with Vista and this was a good way
to do it.