W7 RC1 (7100) on T43p and A31p, briefly...

[ajkula66]

I've spent last several days playing with Win 7 RC1 (7100) on my T43p, and must admit that I've been quite pleased with it. Everything that I find important worked without much tweaking, and the machine felt as fast as in XP. Granted, PM780+2GB RAM+7200rpm HDD helps, but the same configuration felt very sluggish IMO with Vista 32 Business.

Now, enter the boss (as in mother of my children) saying: get rid of this &%(*$ and give me back my XP.

Yes, milady.

So I have a nice 7200rpm drive with a fresh install sitting idle...mhhm...not in this household. Look around, well there's a spare A31p waiting for to be paid for by a fellow forum member...

What are you out of your mind? That's a 7-year old machine!

Well, the worst case scenario # 1 is that the machine will simply freeze during boot since it has only 768MB RAM or that it will take forever to open a program. Scenario #2, and the more likely one according to yours truly, is that it will simply BSOD due to hardware differences between T43p and A31p, as it undoubtedly would in XP.

So I'm sitting there waiting for that freezing on boot.

Nope. The machine boots fine. Device Manager is not happy with the audio driver, but everything else is there.

Locate the driver. Driver decides to be difficult. Uninstall. Re-boot. Three times in a row.

Finally, this fine example of my favourite ThinkPad model gives out a sound of life. Good to go in all aspects.

Hold on for a second there...

While installing/un-installing drivers, programs and utilities I must have re-booted this poor oldtimer at least 25 times. What happened with BSOD?

I guess that there won't be one...

If the official release of W7 manages to keep the smoothness of RC1, it will be a great OS to run on older hardware that wouldn't take Vista under any circumstances, regardless of tweaking.

I'm scared to say it, but it seems like they've gotten it right this time around...let's pray that they don't mess it up from now to the final version...

And it would be the second MS OS that I actually like...the first one was Windows 2000...

C'mon, guys and gals, you have a VERY fine beta here...please, please, please don't improve it too much...

[tinue]

Hello

I've also tried Win7 RC on an old A31p that I keep around. It works nicely, except for the display driver. It installed a generic "VGA" driver (although I can set the resolution to the full 1600x1200), so it is not accelerated.
Did you get around this issue?

Many regards, Martin

[ajkula66]

Yes, by installing Lenovo's Vista drivers for T43p. Works like a charm.

[tinue]

Hello

Interesting.. I tried to install this driver. The installation wenth through without an error message. After reboot, I still get an experience index of 1.0, and the device manager still shows "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" under "Display Adapters".

What ratings do you get under "Graphics" and "Gaming Graphics"?

Regards, Martin

[Brad]

Thanks George for the great write up.

I have a 15" T60 SXGA+ I am going to try this on.

Brad

[pianowizard]

I too have been using Windows 7 RC1 on my T43p (2GB DDR2 RAM, 100GB 7200rpm HDD, 2.26GHz Pentium M) as well as my >7-year-old eMachines desktop (512MB PC100 RAM, 200GB 7200rpm HDD, 1.1GHz Pentium III). UltraNav doesn't work on the T43p, but other than that this OS runs very well. On the eMachines, Win7 didn't have the driver for the Intel video card, so I had to install the driver for WinXP which actually worked. On this ancient machine, Win7 definitely feels slower than XP, but it's tolerable -- it's still much faster than WinXP on my 240Z (500PIII, 256MB PC100 RAM, 100GB 7200rpm HDD). If such a dinosaur runs Windows 7 so well, then my T42, Dell Dimension B110 desktop, and Compaq desktop shouldn't have any problem.

Assuming that Microsoft is going to support Windows 7 for as long as they are supporting XP (2001 to 2014, i.e. 13 years), then most of my computers will probably be useful for at least 14 more years!

[ajkula66]

After reading tinue's post, I checked my scores and both were quite abysmal at 1.00

I've uninstalled the T43 ATi Vista driver and installed A31p/T42p XP driver from here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-41918

This made the OS realize that the GPU is Fire GL 7800 and not Radeon 7500 as it was initially seen, and brought the "graphics" score to 1.9

After that I've installed the monitor driver which made the OS "see" the IPS display, but the scores stayed the same.

Honestly, none of this means anything to me. I don't game, and when I do stuff that is really graphically intense, well...that's what the T43p is for.

My whole "W7 on A31p" thing was more of an experiment out of sheer curiosity than anything else. Regardless of abysmal graphic/gaming score, I still like the way this beta runs on a machine of this vintage.

And, if and when the novelty wears off, I'll just go back to W2K and be flying once again...

[dsvochak]

George wrote:

If the official release of W7 manages to keep the smoothness of RC1, it will be a great OS to run on older hardware that wouldn't take Vista under any circumstances

There are a lot of posts here about W7 on older hardware.

I’ve got it on a T41 and it runs really well. In general, it’s quick and things that would bog the machine down with XP (heavy cpu use for example) don’t seem to have the same effect in W7. The XP drivers are working for hardware that W7 didn’t find.

On the video driver, I got the 7500 XP driver installed as explained in this post:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=76234
Video score up to 1.9 but normal screen re-drawing works quick.

It would really be nice if Lenovo would release a W7 version of things like power manager for older hardware.