X230, windows XP, SSD, and UMTS/3G

[peter-h]

For a complicated reason I need winXP.

I am sure it can be "installed" but how much is going to work? I don't need cameras or fingerprint scanners working. Just the basic laptop (display, sound, trackpad, wifi, bluetooth) and the mobile data adapter.

The SSD is for high altitude operation.

Currently I see a unit going on Ebay with a 250GB SSD. Presumably all of that is a drive c: and one approach might be to reduce that partition to say 100GB (with Disk Doctor etc?) and install XP in the other 150GB. But I don't need win7 at all...

However one thing which concerns me is whether XP is going to trash the SSD.

I have repeatedly found that SSDs get trashed by winXP, in desktops.

Nearly all retrofitted SSDs end up corrupted after about a year or two, in machines running 24/7.

Doing some digging turns up suprising results. It is a fact that out of the box XP (and previous windoze versions back to NT4) write to the registry about once per second. I spent a lot of time on this years ago, on a project where we wanted to shut down a SCSI HD, if there was no machine activity. I found it possible for D: and higher drives but totally impossible for C: (the boot drive).

And SSDs have a write limit per block, which with the automatic remapping of blocks which reached the limit means that an SSD of a given total size will accept a given amount of write data before it is all trashed. For say a 50GB SSD the total which can be written to it is of the order of 30 terabytes. This seems a lot and is a lot for normal human usage, but if you have some stupid code which is writing say 100k every second…

Yet, laptops shipped with XP obviously do disable these stupid writes otherwise their power management (e.g. HD shutdown after 30 mins) would never work. So presumably the OEM versions of XP, and perhaps OEM versions of win7 too, are different in some way to the retail XP DVD.

I have XP on two X60S laptops and a Motion LS800 tablet which admittedly don’t get run anywhere near 24/7 and they have been OK for several years. But all these came with XP preinstalled.

I now have a need to put XP onto a new laptop (probably a Thinkpad X230, which comes with win7 only)...

The VM solution is messy, with e.g. COM port emulation not working quite right. Also I am not convinced that retail XP running under a VM would not simply trash the SSD via the VM anyway…

On the 3G adaptor, the X60S laptops had a very visible antenna near the top RH of the screen. The X230 doesn't have anything visible - is the antenna always present and the adapter just goes under the keyboard? I would still prefer to buy a model with it already in place...

An alternative approach might be to get hold of a Lenovo Thinkpad installation DVD for winXP, which is presumably a special laptop version. But I have never seen such a DVD; even the X60Ss I bought new never came with any CDs or DVDs. The O/S sits in a restore partition - which anyway got lost when I put in the SSDs because Trueimage could not backup/restore that special partition.

I would much appreciate any feedback, on any part of this.

[peter-h]

It looks like nobody reads this site anymore

Anyway, because it does come up on google, let me post something useful to those who have googled and found thousands of hits on the usual trash all over the internet...

It is OK to install winXP on the X230. This is what I did:

I started with the standard XP SP2 DVD.

The first thing is that it will not install because it does not have the SATA drivers for the X230 - even if the X230's HD controller is set to "compatibility" mode as many suggest.

You have to download the Intel HD drivers here: http://support.lenovo.com/en_GB/researc ... D=HT073834

Go under "Storage".

There are two of the same name. I don't recall which one I did... Unfortunately it is an executable, which is nonsense for a machine which isn't running yet (!!) but you can safely execute the .exe on your PC and it expands the stuff into c:\drivers\...

Then copy the files to the root of a 3.5" diskette. NO KIDDING - this is the only way for winXP.

You also need a USB 3.5" disk drive. Plug this into a USB port, with the diskette in it.

Pop the winXP install DVD into a USB DVD drive (or into the DVD drive in the X230 docking station if you have one), let it start up, when it offers Press F6 for installing an alternative HD controller, press F6 and let it carry on. At some stage it will copy the SATA drivers from the diskette drive.

It will offer various installation options. I chose to remove ALL partitions from the HD (it had win7 on it) and formatted the whole SSD with one NTFS partition.

Then install XP as normal.

Then install every dam**ed driver from the above URL - obviously using a bit of common sense. Some of them are not obvious and it is only when it says, during installation, that the hardware was not found, that you know it isn't the right one.

Then go to microsoft.com and download the XP updates, starting with SP3 and IE8 - there will be a few hundred MB of them. The version of IE that comes with XP SP2 is no good for any of this so you need to download SP3 using say Firefox, then install IE8, and then do the rest. I have done this many many times at work.

The battery firmware update package is a funny one - it takes about an hour to update the battery firmware

In the end it all works great. The X230 (I got an I7 model) is awesomely fast. The widescreen display is also nice and better than the earlier Thinkpads like the X60S.

Networking didn't work properly until SP3 and updates were applied, and obviously one has to disable Simple file sharing to get any sort of decent behaviour

It had a 3G radio built in, which I haven't tested yet (needs a SIM card). On past experience this will work straight off using the Lenovo connections utility. Some of the UK ones were locked to Vodafone UK but can be unlocked with DC Unlocker.

I have no answer to my earlier Q on the SSD life with XP. But this laptop won't be running 24/7 so it won't matter.

It will be interesting what version of Trueimage is capable of restoring anything onto this HD controller. Any version can do the backup but a restore needs to be done with one that natively supports the SATA controller. Traditionally I have managed to achieve this by downloading the trial of the very latest TI prog they do, because it gets wiped during the restore anyway

[ajkula66]

It looks like nobody reads this site anymore

This site has been up and down lately, with the latter unfortunately predominant...

I have no answer to my earlier Q on the SSD life with XP. But this laptop won't be running 24/7 so it won't matter.

What SSD is in there to begin with? Different units will call for different approaches...

[peter-h]

The SSD is Intel SSDSC2BW180A3L.

A few more bits of feedback:

Even though I have installed (or think I have installed) the HD drivers, the HD has to be in Compatibility mode. If I switch the BIOS to ACPI (or AHCI?) mode, it bluescreens when windows is starting.

There are two drivers offered for XP:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... im15ww.exe
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... io15ww.exe

Their Readme files look the same but the first has a subtle difference, and it worked. But one has to follow not only the procedure in its readme file (the bit about manually executing the install.cmd file):

9. Install Windows XP and Service Pack 2.
10. Download Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver from the Web site and
extract the driver to C:\DRIVERS\WIN\IRST.
11. Go to C:\DRIVERS\WIN\IRST\PREPARE, and double-click/double-tap install.cmd.

but also, when subsequently XP boots up (which is DOES do OK), discovers new hardware and asks where to find the drivers, you have to manually point it to the c:\drivers\win\irst directory. It won't find it otherwise, which suprised me...

Whether one gets better performance by using the faster mode, I can't easily tell.

Trueimage 2010 won't boot the machine - not even in the SATA Compatibility mode. Maybe TI 2013 or even 2014 might? The company, IME, never replies to any correspondence. I know there is a way to create a custom rescue boot CD - TI uses unix and you merge in unix drivers to make a custom boot CD - but it is a complicated process.

Is there some other backup process which works for Thinkpads, and makes a true full image backup to an ethernet-attached network drive, with a bootable recovery CD perhaps? Such a corporate product must have that, surely?

I still get some unrecognised hardware

http://i.imgur.com/e7c42fZ.png

but none of the drivers on the Lenovo driver page seem to take care of it. They are not related to the docking station, which I am not currently using. I already have a working "hi res audio" driver so I have no idea what this 2nd one is about... The laptop seems to be completely working.