Vista RTM on T60 First Impessions and Review

[arni]

After downloading the whole night Vista RTM from MSDN (started fine then drops at between 50kB) i finally made the jump on my T60 (200763G) from XP to Vista.

My experience with RC1 was so, so. Not to bad, but on the other hand it didn't exite me so well that i could think about switching to Vista after RTM. XP was fine and had all i need. So RC1 lasted about 3 weeks on my 2nd partition only for testing applications agains the new windows.

About 2 Month ago RC2 hit the streets. Grabbed my copy and put it right away on my TP. Performance was greatly improved compared to RC1 but in the end RC2 was definatly the worst build on my TP. The system repeatedly bluescreend on every hibernate. Wireless and network stopped working after every 2, 3 days. Nearly all my hardware caused vista to behave like a wild horse than a working machine. So after i deleted it after only 2 weeks and never thought i would be able to upgrade to vista in near time. The only and most wanted feature IIS7 for developing made me thinking of dropping vista after rtm in a virtual machine.

After reading and watching newsgroups and blogs about the experiences of other users with the final bits i wiped my machine after praying that i don't have to rely on my R&R backups.

I wiped the hole hdd and did a clean install. Install went thru in about 20 min. After reboot vista got thru the oob-screens and in another 5 min. of performance measuring the system was up and running. Vista had all drivers exept for the fingerprint-reader and the pm-device just like in rc2. After connecting to the internet for the first time it installed the pm-device (i can confirm that it's the xp one because of compatibility warnings in event log). Still no drivers for the fingerprint-reader. Secondly i installed the ATI RTM (RC2) display drivers because the default vista graphics driver had problems when swiching betwenn internal and external display (i have a 2nd tft attached digitally via docking-station).

My first impessions so far are great. Performance really improved over the RC versions. Hibernation works now. Office 2007 RTM works very well on the vista bits. Now i will go on and install some of the lenovo beta drivers (especially Ultranav, APS and Hotkey drivers) and see how it goes. By the weekend i will continue to add more of my day-to-day software and be updating this thread how i'm proceeding with my new and "shiny" vista.

[WilsonF]

I had pretty much the same experience installing Vista Business RTM on my T60p 2623DDU. One odd thing is that, with Office 2007 and the Trackpoint Scrolling set to "Standard" the scrolling won't work in Word and Excel, although scrolling will work in other Office 2007 apps and will work if scrolling is set to "Smooth."

There's still no way to use the Verizon EVDO card or the fingerprint reader. Other than those, everything works fairly well.

I haven't done a full test or a full comparison of battery drain, but with Aero/Glass enabled the battery life appears to me to decline quite a bit faster than under XP.

I think I'm going to stick with my XP hard drive until Lenovo gives us some more Vista drivers and TP applets.

[arni]

I've not done a battery comparison between xp and vista, too. Still installing my daily needed apps.

I think that for the compat. of the scroll function there has to be some tweaking done in tp4scrol.ini just like for opera & itunes. But i had'nt time yet to make any tests since i'm working mostly on dockingstation with ext. tft and keyboard + mouse. And my logitech mouse does function properly. But this issue happens both on xp and vista.

Lenovo is stating on their website that there will be tp drivers available in late november. So if we can belive them only 10 more days without propper drivers. That does'nt hurt me since i'm currently working in my office.

More to come...

[dongfangri]

Lenovo is stating on their website that there will be tp drivers available in late november. So if we can belive them only 10 more days without propper drivers. That does'nt hurt me since i'm currently working in my office.

Where did you find the news?

[arni]

Look at the vista express upgrade page from lenovo. on the bottom they are stating that they will try to make drivers available by the end of november.

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/microsoft/vista/upgrade.html

But IMHO i doubt that it will be true. When you look at OEMs and especially hardware manufacturers there still no support for Vista. Maybe i will get better when Vista hits the consumer by the end of january 2007.

After running RC1, RC2 and RTM at the moment i'll have to say that for now Vista is going back on my second partition, dual booting with preloaded XP. There are still some issues which forcing me going back to XP for day-to-day work.

Here are a few of it:

1. Vista at the momenent is not really as fast as my XP install on my TP. Maybe it's because i only have 1GB of memory and there are no opimized drivers available, but that's my personal feeling.

2. Startup times are way faster than XP, but maybe it's beacause i have not so many startup processes than on XP. On the other had Shutdown and especially Hibernate are a real pain. Dog slow. XP goes in Hibernate in about 45 sec. Vista sometimes need over 1.30 min. And since the screen only goes blank you even have to wait until all LCD on the TP goes off.

3. Application startup on Vista is a bit faster than on XP. But overall performance is not better or worse than on XP.

4. Still there are many application compatibility issues. You can go around that, but when you relay on these apps and have a tight shedule, you won't find so much time to fiddle around these issues.

5. The worst! VS.NET 2003 is not supported on Vista anymore. SQL Server 2000, too. VS.NET 2005 only with SP1 which is due to mid of 2007. SQL Server 2005 only with SP2, due to mid 2007, too. MS proposal: go and develop in Virtual PC 2007 (Beta). How do i have to explain my customers they have to upgrade all apps to .NET 2.0 or even go for beta code? Stupid!

6. Cleartype is a real pain making me headache after a few hours coding. On XP and 2003 i never used Cleartype. In Vista it's enabled by default. You can turn it off, but many parts of the OS will still display it's text with Cleartype enabled. Second may apps will still override the OS font smoothing settings like IE7 or Office 2007. Why is MS forcing me to use Cleartype? And last but not least, the new fonts look like poop without Cleartype enabled.

OK. I'm a little bit angry, and it's not really Vistas fault. But i'm really disappointed that MS took 5 years to develop Vista and there are not so many features that force you to upgrade. Even more they completely failed making their own products compatible with their new flagship OS. How in the world should the developers bring benefits to the OS, when they are not really able to use their day-to-day applications? I went thru the beta cycles of Vista and some other apps. But i would never, ever recommend my clients to go for that early bits.[/list]

[dongfangri]

Some drivers for Vista are available now, but the trackpoint still cannot scroll under Word 2007.