Windows 10 upgrade on T410 and T420

[Terrahawk]

I've upgraded my three T410s and one T420 from Windows 7 to Windows 10. All machines are joined to a domain, which I thought would add a nice twist to things. I'd also read about the lack of availability of my favourite Thinkvantage Tools such as Power Manager and Access Connections, so I thought I'd try it out on one of the T410s first. Firstly, I set up and activated a standard Windows 7 install, fully updated and all drivers and applications loaded and up to date. It's a pretty simple install, mainly Windows, Office and my usual crowd of Thinkvantage tools. I then joined the machine to the domain and updated it from the WSUS server. Then I inserted the upgrade USB stick, double-clicked on setup.exe and followed the on screen instructions until about 40 minutes later, there was Windows 10 staring at me in low resolution mode. A quick check of the device managed showed that the display adapter was the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter, not the Intel HD I had about 40 minutes ago. The LCD brightness settings were also locked at maximum too. This happened with both the T410 and the T420.

In what has to be to me the strangest display driver update I have experienced, I thought I'd check out a few things and suddenly the screen went black and then came back at the native display resolution (1440 x 900). The screen brightness hotkeys were now responding properly too. I had to reinstall the Qualcomm Gobi driver to fix a Code 31 on the GPS port but that went without a hitch. The T420 did not need this - it had an Ericsson F5521 and that migrated across with no issue.

I've since tested Access Connections, the WWAN card and it all seems to go fine. The only issue I have found is with Power Manager. I am aware that neither of them is supported by Lenovo for Windows 10. However on the surface, they both start nicely and behave themselves - I can set up network profiles in AC, and set myself up my preferred power plan in Power Manager. The only thing that doesn't seem to work right is the custom charge threshold settings. You can set them and the system behaves itself by following your instructions. Some time afterwards, it resets itself to its default battery charging mode and forgets the threshold settings you put in. I have yet to find a pattern to this so as far as I am concerned, it's random, although I have a tenuous link between the charge mode resetting and installing Windows Updates. Strangely enough, two of the T410 machines does not have this issue. I will have to check whether it's due to an older Power Management driver because I seem to recall updating the two with the bad behaviour with Thinkvantage System Update. If that is the case, it's a bit sad that Lenovo have started making it difficult to find older versions of its drivers now. I'll probably have to dig into my archives and see if I have an installer for an old version around.

A curious new entry in the "System" display is that now the T410 and T420 show as having limited multi-touch, two points. That arrived shortly after the display driver magically updated itself.

Also, Fn-F8 brings up the mouse properties due to some conflict with the Hot Key Settings that claims that it is not compatible with this version of Windows, brings up the standard Fn-F8 display on top of the mouse properties window. A minor annoyance. Do note also that the standard Lenovo UltraNav driver loses the ability to change the trackpoint third button mode so it may pay to have your preferred mode of operation set before upgrading. I hear that downloading the latest drive from either Windows Update or the Synaptics web page addresses this issue but I haven't tried either of those ideas yet. Instead, I fiddled the registry until I got the button behaving right...

Overall, Windows 10 boots faster, shuts down faster and has been quite pleasant to use on the desktop. The lack of control with the updates is annoying but can be mitigated by the use of WSUS or its modern alternative, whose name I do not remember. For some strange reason, our group policy drive maps are delayed by several minutes about half the time. OpenVPN runs fine and Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 handle well. I am finding that Windows 10 does not get in the way of my work much like Windows 7. I am also finding that the more I use it, the more I prefer using it over Windows 7. It brings a lot of the things I liked about Windows 8 / 8.1 to a more desktop-like environment, more similar to Windows 7. Though I never used Windows 8 / 8.1 much, when I did have to use it I didn't have any issue adapting to its dual personalities.

I find the notification center a waste of space though. I've never used it and well, I've idly poked it a few times here and there but it is of no interest to me - it looks like the quick function access menu that I pull down from my phone to turn Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc on and off.

The revamped Explorer is a bit irritating in that it now has a "Quick Access" list instead of "Favourites". The main difference is that the Quick Access list keeps updating depending on where you've been and what you've opened before. For some people I imagine that'd be great but I don't like it. Thankfully you can configure it to behave like it used to do in Windows 7.

Microsoft Edge is weird. On one hand, it is nice and fast and doesn't seem to fluff around like Internet Explorer. However it has a number of other issues - no plugins (at the moment), inability to save usernames and passwords for pages with simple authentication, only a small handful of settings can be changed and a number of handy error messages have been dumbed down to the same level as the "check engine" light in most cars. Still, I'll probably use it because it's there. I do have Firefox installed for all the sites that barf in Edge, and there are certainly plenty. The Microsoft Partner Portal for example - it half works. Sites with certain types of flash ads crash Edge too, but do not crash IE or Firefox.

Battery life is pretty good with Windows 10 - at least as good as Windows 7. I get about 4-6 hours with the T420 and 3-5 hours with the T410, both with batteries in excellent condition (approx. 57 Wh each).

So yeah, I am pretty happy with the change. I'm not so convinced it's an upgrade yet, but it's mostly motivated by the easy availability of full disk encryption which is available for only Windows 7 Ultimate. I'm sure I could do other things with fingerprint readers, encrypting hard disks and hard disk passwords but Bitlocker is nice and easy to set up. If it wasn't for that, I'd still be running Windows 7.

[WVZR1]

A very interesting summary and quite informative. A good read. I'm surprised there aren't more that share similar functionality experiences with various installs. W10 Updates break my touchpad at every update and the 1511 FALL Build was certainly an experience.

What might be an interesting approach might be to do the 1511 build ISO for any new install vs. doing the W10 through the Windows Updates links. Various reads seem to imply it's the way to do it.

[Terrahawk]

Interesting that your touchpad breaks with every Windows update. I'll have to keep an eye out but since driver updates are not handled by our WSUS, we may not have this problem.

In other news, I've downgraded our PM drivers from 1.67.10.20 to 1.67.09.03 which the Thinkpads with no charge threshold issues are running. We'll see if that makes a difference.

[Terrahawk]

Confirmed, using power management driver 1.67.09.03 stops the charge threshold settings disappearing. Solved the problem with both the T410 and the T420.

[Terrahawk]

Latest update in this saga - 1.67.09.03 driver alone doesn't stop the charge thresholds from disappearing. I notice that the T410 that behaves itself is also running Power Manager 6.66.3 whereas the misbehaving ones are running 6.68.8. I have downgrade to 6.66.3 on all of them and we'll see what happens from there.

Funnily enough, one of the good T410s is running Power Manager 7.49.5 or something like that. I'd be keen to see where you download that from.

[MisterB]

Power manager seems to work differently in different Thinkpads in Windows 10. I have Power Manager 3 working perfectly in my X201 Tablet but it is only partially functional in my W520 which has Power Manager 6. I tried the 1511 upgrade in the W520. It nuked Power Manager and wouldn't let me reinstall it. I restored the previous version because I like monitoring power consumption and that part of Power Manager was working. Plus, a Thinkpad just doesn't look right without the Power Manager. The Battery Guage applet that Lenovo has for Windows 10 is a poor substitute. What isn't working on the W520 is the slider control that reduces power consumption on the fly. In the X201, it works exactly the same as in Windows 7.

There is a software compatibility service in Windows 10 and I am going to disable it and see if I can install Power Manager in the 1511 version but I will restore the image I made of it to another disk for that experiment so I don't have to mess around with my main disk which has Windows 7, 10 and Ubuntu in a multiboot configuration. The 1511 upgrade is pretty much the equivalent of a service pack but the install was a repeat of the Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade and took way too much time and bandwidth. For 64 bit Windows it was a 3.7gb download and I just got the ISO image.

[cfds]

Since a month I am running W10 on my T420 and like already reported previously start up and shutdown times are much shorter/quicker than W7...both the X220 and the T420 are running Windows on a mSATA SSD.

W10 is behaving oddly sometimes...sometimes I loose the ability to "left" mouse click. The info appears but when disappears as soon I want to click on it...this come along with some other strange behavior and the only solution is to reboot the PC...EDIT, after the last major update - new build number, I have not seen this behavior anymore!

Wat remains is a struggle to charge my batteries...most of the time the computer "thinks" I am charging the batteries even when the mains are unplugged! Reboot and removing/reinstalling the batteries sometimes helps/allows me to recharge them. I am running 2 batteries on this machine, an extended and a slice battery. Uninstalled Lenovo's power manager and removed and "uninstalled" the batteries in the device manager and had them reinstalled by windows. That restored the ability to recharge them, have to see how this solution is holding up in the future!
So now life goes on without the Lenovo power manager...

As for the X220, I will keep this machine on W7 until all the functions from Lenovo are restored under W10, maybe this will never happen?!