vista on z61m review

[cpascu01]

After a whole day of of installing Windows Vista Business on to my thinkpad. I am finally finished. The installation went smoothly. I chose to perform a clean boot so that my XP license would not be invalidated. Right out of the box, most of my hardware worked with the exception of my fingerprint scanner and my internal flash card reader. Those two were easily solved after downloading the drivers on Lenovo's website.

I downloaded and installed a lot of software and hardware from the lenovo website. These included the ThinkVantage Techonologies software. Out of all of those, the softwares that I seemed to have the most problems with were the Power Manager and Access Connections. I know there's a topic asking about these two and here are my thoughts...

Power Manager:
The Power Manager that comes built into Vista is very good. One of the reason I decided to install Lenovo Power Manger is because I like seeing the green batter on my toolbar. One bug I found with the Lenovo Power Manger was when I choose the scheme Power Source Optimized, my screen display goes all the way to 1 instead of being at maximum when my computer is plugged in. I can fix this either by taking the plug out and then plugging back in or I can just manually make my screen brighter. I find this really annoying. I'm going to try to reinstall it and see if that makes a difference.

Access Connections:
Again, the network connection setup for Vista by itself was very impressive. My only problem with it was that it didn't automatically change when I would go to different locations like Access Connections did. I had some problems connecting wirelessly with Access Connections, but restarting somehow fixed that. I have an issue because TTLS-PAP is still not incorporated into Access Connections. I really wish it was because the 3rd party software I used to use (SecureW2) doesn't support Vista yet, so I can't log on to my school's wireless system.

Other things to comment about...
I haven't found any heating issues yet. My computer still runs as smoothly as when I had XP on in if not a little bit faster. I haven't ran any speed test so I can't make any legitimate remarks. It just feels faster.

My fan is still as quiet as it always was. I barely notice it's running most of the time.

3rd party software that supports Vista isn't really out yet, so I'm making do with what I have. I still need to install essentials such as PDF reader and maybe a bittorrent client.

Hope you've all found this interesting.

edit: I forgot to mention that there was a bios update for my system. I would definitely suggest doing that first before installing Vista because no doing so may lead you to trouble.

[sapibobo]

Hai,

thanks for your review. How about the APS? Is it still working with Vista?

Thx

[cpascu01]

Hai,

thanks for your review. How about the APS? Is it still working with Vista?

Thx

That works great too after i installed the software for it.

[cpascu01]

I got TTLS-PAP authentication to work with Access Connections. I downloaded SecureW2 from http://www.hofhom.nl/securew2/. At first it didn't want to work, so I played around with the wireless settings and restarted numerous times and it finally did.

[elee102]

Power Manager:
The Power Manager that comes built into Vista is very good. One of the reason I decided to install Lenovo Power Manger is because I like seeing the green batter on my toolbar. One bug I found with the Lenovo Power Manger was when I choose the scheme Power Source Optimized, my screen display goes all the way to 1 instead of being at maximum when my computer is plugged in. I can fix this either by taking the plug out and then plugging back in or I can just manually make my screen brighter. I find this really annoying. I'm going to try to reinstall it and see if that makes a difference.

I actually had a similar issue with my vista install on the T60. In addition, the screen never turned off and the machine never went on standby. Do you have a similar problem, or does the screen behave as expected?

[cpascu01]

I actually had a similar issue with my vista install on the T60. In addition, the screen never turned off and the machine never went on standby. Do you have a similar problem, or does the screen behave as expected?

My screen turns off and goes into standby. It even did it when I was plugged in so I went into Power Manager and changed it. I think if you play with the power setting through the Vista software, you'd get results. Did you manage to find a fix for brightness issue?

[dfumento]

Power Manager:
The Power Manager that comes built into Vista is very good. One of the reason I decided to install Lenovo Power Manger is because I like seeing the green batter on my toolbar. One bug I found with the Lenovo Power Manger was when I choose the scheme Power Source Optimized, my screen display goes all the way to 1 instead of being at maximum when my computer is plugged in. I can fix this either by taking the plug out and then plugging back in or I can just manually make my screen brighter. I find this really annoying. I'm going to try to reinstall it and see if that makes a difference.

I actually had a similar issue with my vista install on the T60. In addition, the screen never turned off and the machine never went on standby. Do you have a similar problem, or does the screen behave as expected?

I have the same problem with my X60 with a Vista Ultimate clean install. It is my last remaining problem.

[elee102]

I actually had a similar issue with my vista install on the T60. In addition, the screen never turned off and the machine never went on standby. Do you have a similar problem, or does the screen behave as expected?

I have the same problem with my X60 with a Vista Ultimate clean install. It is my last remaining problem.

Just curious, are you talking about the screen never turning off or the dim startup due to Power Manager?

[elee102]

I actually had a similar issue with my vista install on the T60. In addition, the screen never turned off and the machine never went on standby. Do you have a similar problem, or does the screen behave as expected?

My screen turns off and goes into standby. It even did it when I was plugged in so I went into Power Manager and changed it. I think if you play with the power setting through the Vista software, you'd get results. Did you manage to find a fix for brightness issue?

Nope, never was able to get the brightness fixed due to Power Manager. Brightness was fine using Vista's default power manager, but the screensaver never kicked in and the screen never turned off.

[LasseFJ]

Hej thanks for the info. Im thinking about upgrading my z61m too. Maybe you could forward this review to IBM/lenovo to help them, (and speed up issue fixing)

[ghosh9691]

I had the same issue with the Power Manager software, but since upgrading to the latest ThinkVantage Productivity Center (v2.01.1) released on 11th Feb, things seem to be more stable with the Power Manager software...