Vista on X22 and/or T23

[asiafish]

Has anyone had any luck with Vista on these older machines? I know glass won't be supported, but are there drivers yet for the Radeon and S3 graphics adapters and are the rest of the functions in these older machines supported?

Particularly important are the trackpoint features. I know that newer THinkPads work great, but what these older classics? They both meet the minimum hardware requirements.

[Musti]

Everything below is on a 1.13 T23 with 512 RAM and a fast HD, with a "lite" edition of Vista where stuff like Windows search is not working, and eye candy is at lower settings (not turned off, though).

S3 chip is not immediately recognized, but you can install the XP driver and works fine with Aero Basic (or the old school Win2K interface). Also note the generic fallback VGA driver is better than XP's, so you might think S3 is recognized upon first boot...when in fact it is not.

Trackpad is recognized, and you can also install XP trackpad software just fine.

The only piece of hardware not immediately recognized and thus showing up as Other Hardware in Device Manager is IBM ThinkPad PM (power management) driver. Install it and works fine, though Event log complains this version is not compatible with Vista. Loads fine, interestingly. The machine obeys all PM settings, and SpeedStep is working fine.

It is not that bad, though there's a lot of cruft and unneeded services loaded by default. After some serious tweaking, I was able to get the system use only 200 MB of memory, on a custom Vista image made by vlite (compare this with my current XP SP2 setup, wireless, sygate, and all, consuming around 85 MB upon fresh boot...not bad, eh?)

Also note there's some serious memory management/caching structure in Vista. For example, upon boot, the system RAM usage is around 280 MB, and there's disk activity, but if you do nothing and wait around two minutes, the CPU usage stabilizes around 3% (thus 97% idle) and the RAM usage drops to around 200 MB. The machine runs a bit hotter and the fan comes off more frequently.

All in all, I didn't find it *that* unusable. Regular stuff like surfing, research, Office work fine with XP-level performance. With more RAM, it will get better, though it will not *fly*.

[pianowizard]

I once tried to install Vista RC2 on a T23 with only 256MB RAM and the installation process terminated within several minutes saying that I needed at least 512MB. So, Vista is different from XP which would let you finish the installation even if you only have 64MB of RAM.