Vista Video drive for T41

[sktn77a]

I just installed Vista Business on my T41 (from my T61p recovery CDs). Everything looks good except the video driver. Right now it has the default VGA Vista driver. I've searched high and low on the hard disk and in driver update, but all I can find are Intel drivers. Any idea where the ATI driver (7500/9000 - referred to in other posts on this topic) is located?

[sktn77a]

Well, after about the 100th try, I finally found the box to uncheck while installing ("compatible hardware only"). After this the ATI GPU drivers were visible. So I installed the Radeon 9000 driver and the appearance and business graphics score improved (to 1.9) but the performance didn't seem to change.

Not to worry, I'm just messing around with it, anyway. I'll re-install WIN XP before I sell the T41.

[sktn77a]

After messing some more, it looks like the Radion 7500 (non-mobility?) driver is a lot more flexible than the Radeon mobility 9000. You get a weird split screen at first until you set the refresh rate from the 43Hz default to the necessary 60Hz. With the 9000 driver, I get 800x600 or 1024x768 resolutions only, ie stock resolution. With the 7500 driver, I get everything up to 2048x1536, including a very usable windowed 1600x1200 and 1920x1080 (just increase the refresh rate for the notebook panel to get rid of flicker - I used 120hz at the highest resolutions - should work fine with an external display).

I still think I'm going to go back to XP as I think its quite a bit faster than Vista, but the difference isn't as large as I had feared.

[SaberX]

I put Vista Home Pre on the T41.It has P-M 1.5Ghz , 1.5Gig ram and ATI 9000 32meg , SXGA+.
When i installed vista it had just a very basic windows driver.
I went to Lenovo's web site looking for drivers for vista.They said a more upto date ATI video drivers are included with SP1 for Vista.
After that it worked great.No problems at all.

[sojourner]

sktn77a, thanks for your posts. I too have a T41 and have thought about trying Vista using multi-boot. Been somewhat apprehensive because Vista has such poor performance according to many (unless you are on a high-end PC), so your reports are helpful.

Hope you'll keep us updated ... and BTW, if you have the HDD space perhaps you'll want to dual-boot with XP and have both OS's available!