Anyone upgrade a W530 from W7 to W10?

[CharlieDog]

The reason I ask is I am looking at getting a spare laptop for traveling that could be used as a desktop replacement if needed, and after reading reviews & comparisons have focused on the W530. I've seen some on eBay in my price range, but they are running Windows 7 (!). I am happy with Windows 10 and would want to install it on the laptop i bought, but i wonder if there's any problems with that much of an upgrade. Also the second question would then be, is it still free? TIA

[TPFanatic]

The free upgrade still works when done through the Media Creation Tool.

[Brian10161]

I have Windows 10 on m T430s, and also my T410s. They both handle it just fine, the T430s better more so because it has a more standard hard drive interface and I was able to drop in a decent quality 2.5 inch SATA SSD.

The 3rd gen i5/i7 processors handle Windows 10 very nicely, I can even play light games on my T430s thanks to the nVidia NVS5200m chip. My 430 loaded all of its drivers from Windows Updates, just had to add a couple minor things. Didn't take long to get it loaded at all. Everything should work fairly easily out of the box after Windows gets the drivers. I'm not sure on that model if it only comes with Optimus or if you can get it with just Intel HD graphics, but either way should be no problem.

[w0qj]

We don't have W530, but we have successfully upgrade Win7>>Win10 for:

T410
X230
X250
X1C3
X1C4

So as you can see, there's a good chance that your W530 Win10 upgrade would be OK!

[CharlieDog]

Thanks for the replies. It's good to hear of no problems when upgrading. I wasn't worried about the W530 running W10. I wouldn't worry about upgrading from 8.1 to 10-I've done that on other laptops w/o problems. My concern was going all the way from 7 to 10, that strikes me as really a big jump. Maybe I should just look it as 10 being just 'different' than 7, rather than a major upgrade.....

[dr_st]

When Win10 came out, Microsoft has specifically invested tons of resources making Win7->Win10 upgrades as smooth as possible. Back then (and probably still) there were more systems running Win7 than Win8.1, so their motivation was obvious. While things can always go wrong, I see no reason why an upgrade from Win7 would work or not work more so than an upgrade from Win8.1.

But in any case - wouldn't you be reinstalling the OS from scratch on any laptop you buy used? What is the incentive to do an in-place upgrade?

[FrankK-F]

This was my W530 adventure completed before 14-Jan-2020.

My W530 is and was Win7. With MS ending support for Win7 ... it was time to look to Win10. But instead of replacing Win7 I installed Win10 to its own partition ... giving me dual boot. The installation was very simple and quite fast.

I did this thinking that I will migrate my legacy apps to Win10 ... and if incompatible I can always run them in Win7.

My mucking around with the migration effort introduced an MBR error ... and now I had BLUE screens on startup, to a gray screen with "Lenovo" logo and freeze. Going to the F1 BIOS settings and choosing different boot sequences did not help as the F10 did not save those. My local Geek Squad did not help as this was beyond the "pay-grade' of the technicians of the moment. So was my machine bricked or salvageable? On my retired W500, still working well, I found a 2011 German post that walked me through how to repair/recover the MBR ... also involved removing the CMOS battery for some 20 minutes ... and upon power up vola! I had my machine snap to life. That was $5K I saved as step one in my upgrade venture ... I was eying a P53 fully configured to my needs [Why is there such a manic move to ever thinner? We are talking about engineering work stations.]

I wound up reinstalling Win7, then dual boot install Win10. Reinstalling Win7 was a tedious process compared to Win10. Win7 upgrades and MANY updates took many hours before if was "updated". After repopulating Win7 with all my apps, I tried the various 'compatibility options to install in Win10 ... my big apps, Adobe and Autodesk, were unsuccessful. As it turned out my major apps were no longer supported by their publishers ... they would install in Win10 ... would start then freeze or abort after a few seconds.

Since I am used to having lifetime license to my apps, I was not partial to the monthly rental route ... but the shrink-wrap versions of interest added up to as much as $10K, and were 3-4 years old. In my search for options I stumbled onto "OEM" versions for the titles of interest ... at a fraction of the cost of the shrink-wrap [retail] versions. I was assured that these were legitimate version, the difference is that the publishers don't provide user support. The downloaded titles installed, the supplied keys worked, the apps registered, updates/upgrades downloaded via my registered accounts.

Now I look forward to few more productive years with my W530 ... i7-3940XM / 32GB memory / 1TB mSATA SSD / 2TB SSD / BT Optical Drive / et cetera, et cetera.

My next BIG question is ... when will IBM restart 100% US made ThinkPad computers, with NO Chinese back-doors to think about.

[WizardOfBoz]

I am looking at getting a spare laptop for traveling that could be used as a desktop replacement if needed,

I have two 530s, both running Win 10 Pro, both with 32Gb of memory. They are still very competitive in terms of computational speed (I have 3820qm CPUs) and the graphics don't suck too bad. If I wanted to spend 3 grand, I'd get 50% faster processing and about 3x faster graphics.

For writing computer models using Matlab and such, they work great.

Having said that, they aren't the lightest laptops around. But they may be about the most durable.

I think the W530 was one of the best (with respect to competitive products at the time) laptops ever made.

There are issues with the built-in whitelist ...

[kfzhu1229]

I have a T530i with NVidia graphics. Upgraded to i7-3720qm ES and 16gb of ram. Upgraded to Windows 10 on Day one (it and my T43 were participating in Windows insider programme) because I wanted the look of windows 8.1 combined with the usability of windows 7. This was bought in china so it came with windows 7 home basic and the experience was awful.
And I never had any problems with windows 10 after doing a clean install so W530 should have zero problems too.
Still a pretty great laptop (along with W530) today and I prefer that over today's laptops due to its reliability and modularity, but not my road warrior because I prefer the Magnesium on the outside on my Dell Precision M4300 and the latter is cheaper to maintain. I will switch to that ThinkPad when my M4300 gets obsolete

[735]

I did just recently, and all of a sudden two problems I've had for years went away

a) Microphone was unusable before, tinny sound and nobody could hear - now, it works fine
b) Dolby Sound drivers just work better, sound quality is improved massively
c) Sleep/Wake/Hibernate/Boot/Shutdown is much much faster than 7x64

You won't regret upgrading to W10 on a W530 especially regards to the audio/mic (if you need that, I do..)

[cadillacmike68]

When Win10 came out, Microsoft has specifically invested tons of resources making Win7->Win10 upgrades as smooth as possible. Back then (and probably still) there were more systems running Win7 than Win8.1, so their motivation was obvious. While things can always go wrong, I see no reason why an upgrade from Win7 would work or not work more so than an upgrade from Win8.1.

But in any case - wouldn't you be reinstalling the OS from scratch on any laptop you buy used? What is the incentive to do an in-place upgrade?

To keep things like ms office, quickbooks, tax sw, etc without having to reload everything from scratch.

[dr_st]

But in any case - wouldn't you be reinstalling the OS from scratch on any laptop you buy used? What is the incentive to do an in-place upgrade?

To keep things like ms office, quickbooks, tax sw, etc without having to reload everything from scratch.

So, you want to keep the previous owner's installed program base?

[cadillacmike68]

To keep things like ms office, quickbooks, tax sw, etc without having to reload everything from scratch.

So, you want to keep the previous owner's installed program base?

No - Mine. I'm building a T530 the way I want it, on W7 and intend to back it up and restore it to a different HDD and then upgrade it to W10 on that 2nd HDD. I intend to use the same baseline image for a W530.

Should be feasible, I've done it for over a dozen T61/T500s using two baseline images that I tailored.

[dr_st]

So, you want to keep the previous owner's installed program base?

No - Mine.

Well, my comment specifically referred to the case of buying a used laptop with someone else's installation. I thought it was clear in the context of the original discussion, but maybe not when you reply 4 months later.

[cadillacmike68]

^^
I see your point about using someone else's installation. But in my reading the OP, who has only made one additional post here was concerned with any possible cost of upgrading from 7 to 10.

I have not kept any installation on any used system I buy. I do pull the relevant license #s / product keys, and I have kept some of the HDDs. But If I have only one machine to use, the first thing I do is back up the entire disk using Acronis True Image or something similar and then restore it to another HDD. I can then use that HDD to experiment / upgrade on and it I mess things up, then I can either re-restore to the 2nd HDD or go back to the original HDD.

If I did come across a machine with an install with additional applications that I wanted to use, then I'd consider cleaning up that system and moving forward, but most used ones come with a bare ms oem install without any compelling applications or utilities that I don't already have, so the drives get formatted and have an image restored onto them.

But if I am going from 7 to 10, there's no way I'm doing it on a "fresh" installation nor am I going to install w10 from scratch. I have too many paid for applications that I want to be able to use, so the upgrade in place is the only way for me. Re-installing it all would be too much of a PITA.

[dr_st]

Moderator Notice: I started getting a bit fed up about politics rants spilling into technical threads, so I cleaned this one up and moved all the off-topic posts out of sight. Please let's have no more politics over here. If anyone has any issues with my decision, feel free to contact me via PM.

[WizardOfBoz]

politics rants spilling into technical threads, so I cleaned this one up

+1, thanks!

Wish we had a "like" button. Can't recall: sorry if I was an offender in this regard.

[TinkerMan]

This was my W530 adventure completed before 14-Jan-2020.

My W530 is and was Win7. With MS ending support for Win7 ... it was time to look to Win10. But instead of replacing Win7 I installed Win10 to its own partition ... giving me dual boot. The installation was very simple and quite fast.

I did this thinking that I will migrate my legacy apps to Win10 ... and if incompatible I can always run them in Win7.

My mucking around with the migration effort introduced an MBR error ... and now I had BLUE screens on startup, to a gray screen with "Lenovo" logo and freeze. Going to the F1 BIOS settings and choosing different boot sequences did not help as the F10 did not save those. My local Geek Squad did not help as this was beyond the "pay-grade' of the technicians of the moment. So was my machine bricked or salvageable? On my retired W500, still working well, I found a 2011 German post that walked me through how to repair/recover the MBR ... also involved removing the CMOS battery for some 20 minutes ... and upon power up vola! I had my machine snap to life. That was $5K I saved as step one in my upgrade venture ... I was eying a P53 fully configured to my needs [Why is there such a manic move to ever thinner? We are talking about engineering work stations.]

I wound up reinstalling Win7, then dual boot install Win10. Reinstalling Win7 was a tedious process compared to Win10. Win7 upgrades and MANY updates took many hours before if was "updated". After repopulating Win7 with all my apps, I tried the various 'compatibility options to install in Win10 ... my big apps, Adobe and Autodesk, were unsuccessful. As it turned out my major apps were no longer supported by their publishers ... they would install in Win10 ... would start then freeze or abort after a few seconds.

Since I am used to having lifetime license to my apps, I was not partial to the monthly rental route ... but the shrink-wrap versions of interest added up to as much as $10K, and were 3-4 years old. In my search for options I stumbled onto "OEM" versions for the titles of interest ... at a fraction of the cost of the shrink-wrap [retail] versions. I was assured that these were legitimate version, the difference is that the publishers don't provide user support. The downloaded titles installed, the supplied keys worked, the apps registered, updates/upgrades downloaded via my registered accounts.

Now I look forward to few more productive years with my W530 ... i7-3940XM / 32GB memory / 1TB mSATA SSD / 2TB SSD / BT Optical Drive / et cetera, et cetera.

My next BIG question is ... when will IBM restart 100% US made ThinkPad computers, with NO Chinese back-doors to think about.

this was a good post mate, hope it will be helpful to many, I too have a W530 with the dual boot setup win7/win10, mSATA SSD + SATA SSD, the difference is i have a third SSD in the ultrabay. My question to you is this, How does it handle the thermals of the 3940XM ? I currently have the 3630QM and was thinking to upgrade, but the machine is already hot as it is, hence my shyness to upgrade. since you use autodesk I assume you also have the K200M, right?

[FrankK-F]

Thanks for your comment, TinkerMan.
My machine, 2438-58U, came with the i7-3940XM CPU ... I have not experienced the type of heat issues that you state.
The attached specs page tells the story for my machine ... yes, also K2000M and 32GB mamory.

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PD ... d_W530.pdf

What I added is the mSATA SSD and an unlocked BlueRay optical R/W drive. I also have the dock eith six USB2 and only one USB3 port, the latter to a multiport device to my archive HDD docks. I use a StarTech "USB 3.0 to SATA Hard Drive Adapter" for a third SSD when I need one; it connects to one of the two USB3 ports on the W530 ... also great for cloning operations. My external monitor runs only from the Mini DisplayPort on the W530. I use my Express Card slot for a variety adapters ... USB3 x2, eSATA x2, FW x2, CF Card x2.
I don't use the fingerprint device, nor the X-Rite screen calibrator ... instead use DataColor calibration on both monitors.

As an aside, I started 'computering' in the mid-80s with a ROM-RAM laptop machine, an HP Portable, later an HP Portable-PLUS. All solid state, took about 1 second to reboot from the 3-finger salute; back then I was talking up the idea of work anywhere with a portable computer .. and was considered by my colleagues in the executive dining room as some kind of heretic. Today we are back to the ROM-RAM box now with the SSD's ... but now it takes about 60 seconds to boot with all the SW bloat despite a machine that is several thousand time faster than that ROM-RAM box from the 80s.

Good luck on your upgrade.
FK-F

[cadillacmike68]

Frank, Thanks for the PSREF links.

What is an "unlocked" blue ray drive?

I'm looking at a couple drives. One of them is FRU 45N7463. Says its for the W530, but shouldn't any serial ultrabay slim (or enhanced) fit in the T530 or W530 and work??