Thinkpads Forum

Hello everyone, I have been out of circulation for a long time, but still use only thinkpads and currently own four .

I just grabbed a nice T530 from Ebay for $299, it's in great shape and does have the NVIDIA graphics.

It came with Windows 7 which I do like but recently we upgraded to Win10 on our work laptops and I would like to upgrade my T530.

According to Lenovo they stopped the free upgrades last year.

Is there a workaround for this, can I buy the recovery CD's like in the old days Or do I just have to purchase a copy from M$.

Thanks for any

Yes there is a workaround for that. You go to accessbility settings and enable these high contrast, voice help stuff (but remember where you find them so that you can also turn off later). Then go to the following website to get started
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/accessi ... s10upgrade

Recently upgraded my T530 to i7-3720qm and Windows 10 works great. If you need more power get something like i7 3720QM or 3820QM, mSATA SSD and 16gb DDR3. These CPU are like $250 on eBay, ram is like $80 and same for a smaller SSD

Thanks guys.

Good to see you back Mike, even for a split second. Hope all is well.

Even though you're considering an upgrade to W10 you're still my friend... ... let alone one of the best Mods that this forum has ever had.

Try to stop around here more often if you can.

LOL - Thanks George , believe me it took me a while to come around to win10, some tweaking is necessary .

If you haven't gone through the preview versions of Windows 10, you have no idea what to expect. I joined that Windows Insider program with my T43 starting from build 99xx (trust me, that was slow as hell but I didn't know what speed I was to expect with my T43) with tons of bugs and slowdowns to 10240 when I got my free license! It REALLY got faster from the build 99xx even on a T43 and yes the amount of tweaks increases. Now for the latest build 14393 even the traditional taskbar & start menu properties settings that was introduced in Windows 95 is ditched! Now it takes you to the new tablet-friendly settings window!
I mean there is a lot to get used to, but while the UI tweaks are much more evident than Mac OS X, Microsoft REALLY tried hard to keep all the legacy working! There are still some stuff that won't work in Windows 10 anymore, but in x86 Windows 10 something like edit.com and debug.exe still works just fine. My ES1938S sound card driver for Windows 2000 still works in Windows 10 even though the joystick port seems no longer supported. Chances are that as long as your devices have drivers that are designed for Windows Vista and newer it is very likely to work just fine in Windows 10.
If you are annoyed at the automatic updates go to services and disable Windows Update service. It works but at the cost of unable to install modern apps from the store until you re-enable it!
Also if you have fingerprint sensor, try Windows Hello instead after installing the driver from the utility provided by Lenovo. It is a lot faster and with 99.9% accuracy on my T43's scanner than the ThinkVantage/Access IBM Fingerprint Utility!

kfzhu1229, yes, I agree, I initially did the free upgrade from 7 to 10 last year on my X60, when they had that annoying free upgrade message going constantly when you booted., since MS seldom gives things away I thought "why not". I think that was January or something like that. Well I had it on my X60 for about three days and hated it, mostly due to the account they want you to create for the features, so I rolled back to Seven, which is a better version of XP in my mind.

I want to give it another shot since my work machine which is a W541 seems to run decent with it, might even do a dual boot scenario if drivers become an issue. I have had issues at work with print drivers, I work for Xerox so I have to make stuff work with this new OS or find a workaround. But the issues have been minimal.

I appreciate all the help and the kind words

Well if your work computers are Windows 7, then you will have to do some workarounds or at the worst of the worst, boot Windows 7 in a virtual machine or dual boot with Windows 7. So far I have NO problems with drivers either. I have a Canon MF5700 printer with Windows XP x86 driver and it works just fine in Windows 10! You'd never be able to do that with a modern version of Mac OS since Apple was switching from PowerPC to Intel P6 back in the days. When they offer free upgrade, you back up your files, upgrade and then wipe using reset this PC option in the settings menu or else the performance will be far from Windows 10's true potential. After upgrading to 10240 from previous builds, I noticed that it still takes 2 minutes to start and I used another hard drive and reinstalled 10240 (the license will be automatically registered) and then that T43 takes 40 seconds to FULLY start.
FYI if you want to use Windows 7 without Windows 10 upgrade notice, go to BIOS setup and disable NX. Windows 8 and up will not run without NX and Windows 10 upgrade assistant knows that!
Also X60 is the first X series that can fully run Windows 10 as while X41 runs Windows 10, you are also stuck with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter since GMA 900 isn't supported while GMA 950 is the first GMA that is supported.
I would suggest you to try Windows 10 x86 for a week on a spare laptop that has Sonoma Pentium M (R52/T43/p) or better (or desktop Pentium 4 5xxJ/6xx or better and Celeron processors are not recommended), 2GB RAM and DX9 capable GPU (X300, X600, 9500, 9600, FireGL T2, FireGL V3200), and if you can work with that, you can definitely work with Windows 10 on a W541.
If you don't like how Windows 10 works, just stick with Windows 7 like George does and disable NX if you can

kfzhu1229, that "workaround" worked fine, thanks. Very simple to do.