switch back to XP

[citimeta]

I have a T60 comes with VISTA installed on it. I also have an XP disc. Vista gives me too much trouble and I don't like it at all. Does anyone know a good way to uninstall my vista and put XP into the T60?

[mgo]

I have a T60 comes with VISTA installed on it. I also have an XP disc. Vista gives me too much trouble and I don't like it at all. Does anyone know a good way to uninstall my vista and put XP into the T60?

Gee, my three T60s run great with Vista Biz. Fast and stable, but that's with some of the usual performance adjustments done. (just like we used to do with XP)

Best way is to image your original Vista install using Acronis or some other 3rd party program over to an external USB drive, and then install XP fresh. Just make sure you have already downloaded the XP ethernet driver from Lenovo because XP will not have those. Also set the drive to "campatibility" mode in bios or the XP will not see the SATA drive.

You're in for a lot of work and not much gain, frankly.

[jdhurst]

<snip>
You're in for a lot of work and not much gain, frankly.

It will be a lot of gain, but well worth the effort.

I have a Vista T61p that has 4x as much CPU as my T41, 4x as much memory as my T41, and Vista uses 4x as much disk space. For all of that Vista manages to do only half of what my T41 with XP can do. Vista for me has been a tragic and expensive failure that cannot manage enough to let me use it for business. I do agree it is fast and reliable. ... JDH

[erik]

I have a Vista T61p that has 4x as much CPU as my T41, 4x as much memory as my T41, and Vista uses 4x as much disk space.

don't forget that hard disk drives are also 4x larger, memory is 4x larger, and each are 4x less expensive (including the T61p) compared to 4+ years ago when you bought your T41 new.

[fschwep]

I saw on the Lenovo site they have a special 'return to XP' kit available for people who bought a machine with Vista. I think it was under Downloads and manuals or something like that.

[carbon_unit]

citimeta, I would recommend that you make the recovery set before removing Vista. Then go into the BIOS and set the sata to compatibility mode, Put in an XP disc and install XP. When you are done get the drivers and downloads here for your system.

[carbon_unit]

I saw on the Lenovo site they have a special 'return to XP' kit available for people who bought a machine with Vista. I think it was under Downloads and manuals or something like that.

Link us up!

[Stargate199]

For laptops, the best way to improve performance is to disable Superfetch. The best was to speed up boot time and boost battery life.

[mgo]

For laptops, the best way to improve performance is to disable Superfetch. The best was to speed up boot time and boost battery life.

For clarification on this alleged tweak go to:
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000621.html

[hellosailor]

Check with Lenovo. Depending on which version of Vista is on your machine, your "Lenovo Product Recovery" discs may actually contain a factory install of *XP* not Vista.

If so, you need to BURN the Vista Recovery discs from within Vista, you have no other backup media for that installation. (That's MS's hare-brained scheme, not Lenovo's fault.)

And again, if so, all you need to do is back up your data to another place, use the Lenovo "Nuke 'em!" discs and you will wind up with a T60 that has an OEM XP installation on it, as if it was bought that way.

Otherwise? I'm not entirely sure how you could keep the Lenovo diagnostic partition (if you wanted to) because installing XP from a retail disc might just wipe out everything. But removing Vista is easy, an other NT installation (XP is NT 5.1) will offer to wipe out and reformat the hard drive when you go to install it.

If you do install XP--before you start, make sure you have the Lenovo XP drivers for your system downloaded someplace, i.e. on discs. And of course, backups for all your data. You programs will need to be reinstalled as well.


On the Vista-vs-XP issue: XP has been out for 8 years now, it is Windows2000 at heart. That's time to get a lot of bugs out. But Vista has different core code, and MS stopped all development, threw out some of their code,and spent two months retraining all their development teams to put security and stability ahead--or so they claim. That hasn't stopped Vista from going belly-up on my machine, I'm still trying to nail down the culprit. But the more time I spend in Vista, the more I learn it, the more I'm thinking that the extra time on the learning curve is well spent.

Yes, Vista can be slower. Disable all the stuff that XP doesn't have or run, disable all the stuff that defaults to being "on" now instead of "off"...disable the new Aero GUI...and things start to get closer in terms of performance.

[trdickinson]

<snip>
Vista for me has been a tragic and expensive failure that cannot manage enough to let me use it for business. I do agree it is fast and reliable. ... JDH

Please explain! If you find Vista to be fast and reliable, what does it fail to do that prevents you from using it for business?

I have a new T400 that came with XP pre-loaded, but with disks for upgrading to Vista Business. I ordered it that way on the recommendation of a friend. But, now I am thinking about doing the upgrade, in order to take advantage of the switchable graphics feature on my computer, which is supposed to add over an hour of battery life.

[GomJabbar]

Please explain! If you find Vista to be fast and reliable, what does it fail to do that prevents you from using it for business?

That's old news. Vista itself, Drivers, and necessary Software has been updated so that JD Hurst now uses Vista successfully for business. It was a rocky journey in the early months though.

[hellosailor]

tr-
Every "new" OS, from every vendor (including Mac and the *NIX OSes) has been problematic. With Vista, the pros and cons are well documented. The OS runs more code, so it will run "slower" on any given hardware, and it will run best with more RAM, at least 2GB. Part of "slower" is simply that the OS is doing more tasks--some of which you can disable, some of which you might not want to.
If the motherboard is built for Vista, Vista can power down subsections to conserver more power than XP can. OTOH, if you have peripherals, a scanner, older software versions--some of them just won't work in Vista.

It really is a mixed bag. The question is, do you NEED to use Vista for anything? If not, you can stay in XP and skip the learning curve--because there's always one of those with a new OS, too. The Vista UACs can be a PITA to most single users--but, they also can stop malware. Always a tradeoff.

Hopefully you've got an external hard drive ($105 will buy a terabyte now, rofl) so you can back up the XP image and restore it IF you change your mind. I'd be surprised if you have Vista "upgrade" discs per se, MS usually won't allow those ot be distributed. Odds are that you will be rebricking your computer with a set of "nuke'em" discs, and then choosing Vista as the install option from there. Beware, you have to make the Vista restore discs on your own after that--from a submenu prompt.

[jdhurst]

trdickinson - my posts here were old while I was making Vista work the way I need. I upgraded all my software, and vendors made critical updates available. So now I have had Vista Business 64-bit in production since mid-September. Just over 90 days now, and the Vista laptop has become my daily driver. .... JDH

[trdickinson]

Thanks to all three of you -- Gom, Hello, and JD -- for your comments.

Hello, you're probably right that I would have to "rebrick" my computer to install Vista with the CD's that came from Lenovo. I have not looked at them carefully, or thought too seriously about the implications of that course of action. The inconvenience that would entail makes the prospect of occasionally having to change BIOS settings and install new display drivers in order to switch to the integrated GPU seem like a minor nuisance by comparison.

The extra hour of battery life to be gained by switching to the integrated GPU was the major reason I was contemplating the move to Vista. That's not such an urgent concern for me right now. However, I was intrigued by a comment I've read in this forum to the effect that the Vista display drivers improve the quality of screen images.

I depend upon my T400 for my business, but my computing needs are fairly basic: I need to run MS Office, work with lots of PDF files, and want to be able to handle all types of Web-content. My main criteria for satisfaction are reliability and speed. It sounds like Vista is not likely to help me there, and I really don't want to have to tinker with it to figure out which features I can and should disable for better performance.

Although my T400 is noticeably faster than my old Gateway 450XL in several respects, I am actually surprised that the speed improvement is not greater, given that it is a big step up in terms of RAM, CPU, bus width, and HD speed. Perhaps I need to devote some time to whittling down the size of my Outlook PST files.

If Windows 7 will arrive within the next 12 months, and be essentially a more refined and better-behaved version of Vista, as I hear it will, perhaps it would make more sense for me to just wait and spare myself an unnecessary interim computer surgery.

[K0LO]

...my computing needs are fairly basic: I need to run MS Office, work with lots of PDF files, and want to be able to handle all types of Web-content. My main criteria for satisfaction are reliability and speed. It sounds like Vista is not likely to help me there...

For what you want to use your computer for you probably would not be disappointed by Vista. I've run all versions of Windows since Windows 1.0 and Vista is by far the most reliable OS of the lot. I've been running it for 2 years now and it has been more reliable than XP, and substantially faster for standard office apps and web browsing. Adobe Acrobat 8, MS Office 2007, Firefox 3, etc. all open in less than 2 seconds; what's not to like about that?

The biggest unknown will be the quality of Lenovo's drivers and their factory setup of the OS; not Vista itself. Do you know anyone with similar hardware who is running Vista? If so, take it for a test drive and then make your decision based on what you see for yourself.

[trdickinson]

The biggest unknown will be the quality of Lenovo's drivers and their factory setup of the OS; not Vista itself.

My T400 came with the XP downgrade pre-loaded, so the biggest unknown would be how successfully I could negotiate an appropriate setup of the OS with the Wizard on the Vista installation disks from Microsoft.

[jdhurst]

<snip> For what you want to use your computer for you probably would not be disappointed by Vista. I've run all versions of Windows since Windows 1.0 and Vista is by far the most reliable OS of the lot. I've been running it for 2 years now and it has been more reliable than XP, and substantially faster for standard office apps and web browsing. Adobe Acrobat 8, MS Office 2007, Firefox 3, etc. all open in less than 2 seconds; what's not to like about that?

The biggest unknown will be the quality of Lenovo's drivers and their factory setup of the OS; not Vista itself. Do you know anyone with similar hardware who is running Vista? If so, take it for a test drive and then make your decision based on what you see for yourself.

Largely true. On the reliability front I have had zero (none) operational crashes on NT4, 2000, XP Pro, and Vista Business 64-bit. So while Vista is reliable, it is no more reliable than any of its NT predecessors.

The loading comment is true - do consider Adobe 9 as it is better and more adaptable to Vista 64-bit

With respect to the Lenovo drivers, the drivers that came with my T61p work perfectly well. I don't use and I uninstall R&R and Client Security. .... JDH

[K0LO]

...do consider Adobe 9 as it is better and more adaptable to Vista 64-bit

That upgrade has been on my radar screen for a while now; thanks for prodding me. Upgrading to version 9 is well worth it. Each of the newer versions of Acrobat (7, 8, and 9) have been faster to load than the previous one. 9 seems to start up in half the time of 8, so that's a refreshing change from the days of the dreaded version 6.