Windows 7 with/without EE back-to-back comparisons

[ricerocket]

Anyone want to do some benchmarks with me? The EE thing seems sort of dubious, and it also makes me wonder why Lenovo wouldn't extend this courtesy to those who spent the extra coin to be an early adopter for their systems.

I'll be doing a clean Windows 7 Ultimate x64 install next week w/ the W7 specific BIOS reflash, and with device drivers only, I'll run a few benchmarks:

- bootup, shutdown, suspend, hibernate times
- PCMark 05/Vantage
- battery life maybe (although quite variable depending on battery health)

Maybe we can pair people up W7 non-EE and EE?

My specs:

x200s
SL9600 2.13 GHz C2D
128GB Samsung SSD
WXGA+ (probably not relevant)
Intel WiFi 5300 AGN
Bluetooth
9-cell battery

Also, this may be out of the scope of this topic, but if we hold a legal Windows 7 COA, could we potentially image W7 EE preinstalled OS's legally and re-distribute them? Would the tweaks (if real) be the intellectual property of Lenovo or of Microsoft?

[jjesusfreak01]

I imagine that many of the tweaks that allow such quick booting on the EE laptops probably have a hardware component. The actual Win7 installations may have nothing to do with it, and hacking a new bios to work with unsupported hardware is dangerous to suicidal. That said, who knows, there may be some stuff we can pull from Lenovo's builds of Win7. Note though that neither Lenovo nor IBM have a history of holding out on their customers, so if a new feature or program is not released for older systems, it is likely because it will not work.

[ricerocket]

Personally, I highly doubt there's new hardware since that would require sweeping changes across multiple platforms within the same model designations...which would be too much effort for a non-new model. Tweaked BIOS? Maybe.

And in that case, dumping the EE BIOS and reflashing it onto an older system should be possible as well.

[Colonel O'Neill]

I wonder what would happen if someone just mirrored an Lenovo preload image on to a pre-7 machine with identical components...