Windows 7 on T40p - does Anyone even care?

[p090]

I am actually writing in a forum asking for some straight answers after endlessly searching the web for months at least:

*** WHY is o.n.l.y. 2D performance inadequate on vista/win7 working with T40p & vista mobility radeon 9000 driver,
as compared to XP working with its standard driver on the same machine ?!? Is there NO REMEDY? ***

The story goes as such: Vista.. works on T40p, i personally disliked it so it is mostly out of discussion. Win7 however, works at least the same and better in most areas as XP does on that same machine, BUT: the vista mobility radeon 9000 driver is fine for 3D at least, no complains there; however - against XP which works fine in the following areas - you Cannot for instance watch a plain fullscreen youtube video without decreased framerate, you Cannot watch a plain ol' movie without a jagged line showing at top screen when the whole scenery moves from side to side for instance. For this sole reason it makes life really annoying with win7.

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I have tried every possible driver combination, crashed it, recovered it, googled the world and back. Besides some Fn keys not working properly and whichever, the system works Fine except the above. I'm utterly pi**ed off, growing sick and tired of ms cr** and ati cr** drivers on much more than 1 machine and os, but this puts the cherry on top.

A T40p 1.5Ghz 1G ram mobility radeon 9000 64M vram is well comparable to most "fresh new" junk netbooks, BUT it actually has a Screen, optical drive and a >= 2-3hr battery time; if win7 is better than xp WHY those having these machines have to be impared to use it!?!? why the hell is one suppose to spend hundreds of $ to change a machine for another if one does NOT want to, all because of the .. radeon drivers and/or m..soft ?!!??

Note for those not knowing - this machine in linux world works with native ati driver and OLDER KERNEL or DECREASED PERFORMANCE with the open source driver, due to the same lovely "support" that ati has always shown.

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[Ragueneau]

I didn't test it extensively, but I had some success pulling the driver for the 9000 from Vista on my T41 (using some driver grabber tool) and forcing 7 to accept it. Kind of a dirty solution, but serviceable.

To answer your question, Win7 has a stated preference for DX9-10 cards. If it has a lifeanything like XP (8 years) then by EOL the support you're looking for will be 12 years old. It sucks now but it's not completely unforgivable.

[bill bolton]

A T40p 1.5Ghz 1G ram mobility radeon 9000 64M vram is well comparable to most "fresh new" junk netbooks

Only if you squint very hard indeed! Even the last T40's produced are ~7-8 years old now and the mobile computing world has changed significantly at numerous levels since then.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[p090]

I didn't test it extensively, but I had some success pulling the driver for the 9000 from Vista on my T41 (using some driver grabber tool) and forcing 7 to accept it. Kind of a dirty solution, but serviceable.

To answer your question, Win7 has a stated preference for DX9-10 cards. If it has a lifeanything like XP (8 years) then by EOL the support you're looking for will be 12 years old. It sucks now but it's not completely unforgivable.

It is the same "pulled" driver i was mentioning in the post, other than that one older "DNA ATi" driver for XP seems to work just the same when installed via device manager after unzip, but still the same 2D performance.

..and yes, i know about the "stated preference".. ms software and os's are known to have a lot of.. "preferences" that sometimes defy common sense..

I suppose i could live with the idea of not much being done, i was just hoping that there IS a solution out there for this "tiny" drawback that would make me give up that os for the selected machine..

I also do not understand why Ati, when declaring something as "obsolete", just crosses its arms and does nothing. At least for the sake of something well done post its hw/driver code somewhere when obsolete; for the least consideration regarding your own product and your own clients, if not for the guys working in open source land who can actually make good use for that piece of hw.. But the reasons for the way these things are, can be found way beyond this topic.

[p090]

Only if you squint very hard indeed! Even the last T40's produced are ~7-8 years old now and the mobile computing world has changed significantly at numerous levels since then.

Cheers,

Bill B.

I am aware that computing, as well as mobile computing has changed significantly, you are aware of it, but does the average Joe know that or even cares about it?

As long as he's comfy reading his mail, watching a movie, playing a small game or two or just having his lappy around for general purpose computing and wireless, can you blame him, and can you sincerely tell him when his machine is "obsolete" that he has to buy a new one just because the new os shows jaggy movies?
The guy spent $ 1k on his perfectly good thinkpad back in 2003 and he's always kept it clean and neat, updated a ram, optical drive, has additional drive bay battery and what not, and now he has to just change it because of just 1 chip driver junked by its makers.

I just feel it's a bit too soon to call it "obsolete", a tiny bit too soon..

I am aware of technological advances, i am aware of the fact that thinkpad models mostly have interchangeable accessories, i am aware of the "moral" deterioration of machines, i'm not standing "in the way of progress" nor marching for the everlasting support of the 286 machines or anything.. but the whole attitude of "it's old, stop using it" should be a little more up to the user.

I truly don't believe for one second that it would've been a huge tragedy/waste of time for ati to just let some compatible driver out there for some 2-3 newer os's/kernels. As for ms, i mostly stopped ranting about them for some time - it's an os, you can switch to another - but a different gfx chip you can't just solder on your thinkpad like switching some agp board.

But that's ok, thanks for your time

[dr_st]

Only if you squint very hard indeed! Even the last T40's produced are ~7-8 years old now and the mobile computing world has changed significantly at numerous levels since then.

Note that he said "netbook", not "notebook", and I'm sure what he meant is it is comparable as far as hardware (CPU/GPU/RAM) performance goes. Which is true, when compared to an Atom with some GMA500/GMA950 integrated video chip.

I have tried every possible driver combination, crashed it, recovered it, googled the world and back. Besides some Fn keys not working properly and whichever, the system works Fine except the above.

The symptoms you describe may have more to do with the video codecs installed than the actual video driver. Have you tried installing DivX/Xvid/FLV codecs? A codec pack like K-Lite or Ace, or CCCP, can be helpful here. Not saying that it is guaranteed 100% to work, but I would try.

A T40p 1.5Ghz 1G ram mobility radeon 9000 64M vram is well comparable to most "fresh new" junk netbooks, BUT it actually has a Screen, optical drive and a >= 2-3hr battery time; if win7 is better than xp WHY those having these machines have to be impared to use it!?!?

You have to understand that Win7 was not even in the planning when your T40p and the hardware in it came out. You cannot expect hardware vendors to write drivers for an operating system that does not exist yet, can you? And you also cannot expect them, every time a new OS comes out, to go back to every piece of hardware they ever made, re write and update the drivers, can you? There wouldn't be much progress and innovation made, if everyone was constantly busy updating old, obsolete stuff. The general consumer base wants to move forward, towards newer, faster and (arguably) better things. It just wouldn't be smart resource allocation for the companies to work out compatibility between old HW and new SW, or new HW and old SW. I'm sure it can be quite irritating to those of use, who for whatever reason want to move forward while retaining some of the older technologies, but se la vi.

why the hell is one suppose to spend hundreds of $ to change a machine for another if one does NOT want to, all because of the .. radeon drivers and/or m..soft ?!!??

Well... you don't have to, do you? Your laptop still works just fine with the OS that was designed to run on it. You insist on installing an operating system that was never tested/designed to run on your hardware, you have to accept the fact that not everything may operate 100%.

[bill bolton]

As long as he's comfy reading his mail, watching a movie, playing a small game or two or just having his lappy around for general purpose computing and wireless, can you blame him, and can you sincerely tell him when his machine is "obsolete" that he has to buy a new one just because the new os shows jaggy movies?

I have no qualms at all about quite sincerely telling someone with a ~7+ old laptop that they need a new one... for a whole host of reasons!

Cheers,

Bill B.

[p090]

I have no qualms at all about quite sincerely telling someone with a ~7+ old laptop that they need a new one... for a whole host of reasons!

Cheers,

Bill B.

I agree, I was just pondering that some (perhaps maybe a lot of) folk may not be receptive to that idea for the above mentioned reasons. I for one know what hardware i need, what are the limits and expectations. Some however are still based on the idea that if a buck well spent physically lasts a lifetime, why should software stop it? ..especially when *nix os's tend to be able to get up and running on almost anything equipped with a processor, and even offering maxed performance for it (such as working 3D hw accelerated desktop on machines that barely support xp)

My surprise (more or less) was this little glitch in the increasingly vast land of compatibility that "modern" operating systems have proven to offer.

[p090]

The symptoms you describe may have more to do with the video codecs installed than the actual video driver. Have you tried installing DivX/Xvid/FLV codecs? A codec pack like K-Lite or Ace, or CCCP, can be helpful here. Not saying that it is guaranteed 100% to work, but I would try.

Unfortunatly i am not much satisfied with this ideea since i am solely running on the likes of kmplayer, mplayer and vlc for quite some time with not much problems encountered. The last time i actually installed codecs on one of my machines should've been around a few years back.

The play "tests" i made were done using recent versions of kmplayer and vlc in their intact and exact same configuration as used flawlessly on whichever windows or computer, regardless if it's done from thumbdrive or another partition. No extra codecs installed, no compatibility errors, nothing more; i even tried all render outputs in vlc to no avail. However, nothing linked to codecs should influence the fullscreen framerate of a plain youtube video, which is also slowed down.

It has something to do with drivers, DirectX as Ragueneau said and thus supposably the cpu vs gpu 2D processing ratio - the cpu shows a minimum of 10% more stress when playing in these conditions under win7, even though an opengl game for instance if running flawless in xp also ran in 7 with no glitch.

You have to understand that Win7 was not even in the planning when your T40p and the hardware in it came out. You cannot expect hardware vendors to write drivers for an operating system that does not exist yet, can you? And you also cannot expect them, every time a new OS comes out, to go back to every piece of hardware they ever made, re write and update the drivers, can you? There wouldn't be much progress and innovation made, if everyone was constantly busy updating old, obsolete stuff. The general consumer base wants to move forward, towards newer, faster and (arguably) better things. It just wouldn't be smart resource allocation for the companies to work out compatibility between old HW and new SW, or new HW and old SW. I'm sure it can be quite irritating to those of use, who for whatever reason want to move forward while retaining some of the older technologies, but se la vi.

I am well aware of the phenomenon and totally agree, yet, in this particular case - vista had this working driver included, yet "hidden" aka "not installed by default because it doesn't count since aero ain't working anyway" - and This same driver, although not included in win7 still works fine on it, xcept the mentioned 2D part. That "Microsoft XDDM" driver is from what i understand, the actual ati xp driver modified by Microsoft to fit the Vista driver model. Now, if ati claimed it an obsolete device, and ms adapted the old driver to the new architecture, then why not do it till the finish and make it 100% working, and most of all why keep it "hidden" in secrecy?

Well... you don't have to, do you? Your laptop still works just fine with the OS that was designed to run on it. You insist on installing an operating system that was never tested/designed to run on your hardware, you have to accept the fact that not everything may operate 100%.

I know i know, i was just frustrated with such a tiny thing that's holding me back from switching to the less tweak&maintenance needing win7 As for the "average Joe" he would be kind of outraged on this driver limiting issue

[kstuart]

I have no qualms at all about quite sincerely telling someone with a ~7+ old laptop that they need a new one... for a whole host of reasons!

Frankly, every time I see someone post this comment, they never give any reasons.
I just purchased a near-new T40 to replace a family member's failed T22 and they are quite happy with the performance.
Current PC hardware has higher performance numbers than older PC hardware, but I do not know of anything that is not simply quantitative.

[bill bolton]

Frankly, every time I see someone post this comment, they never give any reasons.

Every time? Clearly you haven't been looking that hard!

Also, you didn't give anything much approaching a "reason" for your position either

Here's just a few reasons for my assertion:

• 7+ years is life expired in terms of the design envolope for mobile computing devices, which has all sorts of implications for supportability, which includes obtaining even general industry parts, such as 2.5" PATA drives, which are rapidly becoming (or already have become) unobtainable.
  
  The design specifications for common, contemporary applications and platform software have moved beyond the practical performance envelope of 7+ year old hardware.
  
  The design specifications for common communications technologies have moved beyond the the practical support capability of 7+ year old hardware.
  
  All vendor support for drivers, and associated software, which are specific to the platform has definitively ceased, as even large corporate users will have retired their laptops after 5 years or so.

Cheers,

Bill

[kstuart]

The first and fourth reasons are circular, i.e. " the equipment is outdated because no one is supporting it, because it is outdated ".

The second and third reasons are just longer statements of your original unspecific statement.

There are no common applications and software that do not run on a T40, and there are no newer communications technologies (I wish there were, but Wimax seems to have been delayed to death, and even that would have just popped into a PCMCIA slot).

[p090]

ehm.. i'm starting to have mixed feelings about this one..

i say if something is labeled "obsolete" but still cheerfully working for hundreds of users at least, then it's not truly obsolete. Parts, even new Do still exist, even new in online stores and so forth, but not "officialy" from the factory.

And besides that, there is another undeniable reality: the "do it yourself" technique - alive through open source communities, wikis, forums such as this one, and many more.

If something "new" works fine around 95% of it's functions on your "obsolete" machine, the same "species" as those hundreds more stilll cheerfully in use, why not try to solve the other 5% left, IF it truly can without a real halting point. You can google anytime to find users working on a daily basis with almost Anything on their new or "obsolete" or even "truly ancient" machines, be it supported, unsupported, official, experimental or home made software and what not. They keep doing it, porting, writing rewriting, tweaking and setting everything until it works. They even rise the functionality of things Not working, or working below 50% or lower!

- to be continued -

[craigmontHunter]

There are limits on what you can expect 7 or 10 or 15 year old computer hardware to do, but as long as you stay within those limits, and those limits are outside what you need to do, then there is no real reason to update, provided that you feel confident eneough to repair it whenever something goes wrong. if you are just going to take it in and get it repaired somewhere, then save the money and buy a new computer. For example, the toshiba in my signiture, I kept it running for a year after I bought it used for $100. I got an acer when the toshiba's battery would no longer hold a charge, and a thinkpad when the acer wore out (<6 months). The thinkpad, once the GPU issue is fixed should do what I need untill the end of highschool, since all I need it for is to type notes, check e-mail and web surfing. It does what I want. That is the biggest thing in my opinion.

[kstuart]

p090 - There are no specifics in your post either.

Here is an example -

One drives one's 2008 Honda Civic to work, and after work, stops at the grocery store, and then proceeds home.

One drives one's 1967 VW Beetle to work, and after work, stops at the grocery store, and then proceeds home.

One drives one's 1964 Mercedes Benz to work, and after work, stops at the grocery store, and then proceeds home.

One drives one's 1925 Model T to work, and after work, stops at the grocery store, and then proceeds home.

Probably the best user experience (from amongst these) is the 1964 Mercedes Benz.

[p090]

p090 - There are no specifics in your post either.

If you're referring to my previous post - yes, i was talking about the general ideea of things


For something more specific, here are some examples - the T4x series - still have spare parts available used or new on ebay or online stores including for the "obsolete" T40

The "obsolete" radeon 7500, 9000's and what not have working open source drivers for nix* os's using the graphical X server, drivers that are continuously being improved and developed, drivers that sometimes proved useless some years ago and now are close if not equal in performance to the official outdated drivers (depends on chip model and driver development stage) e.g. the open source "radeon" and "radeonhd" drivers compared to the official "fglrx" for specific models

if you just google "<os> on <computer model>" where <os> is the generic operating system name eg. xp, suse, osx, freebsd etc, and <computer model> is what it says eg gx260, T41, nc6120, you are likely to find at least one post in the first 1-2 pages dating somewhere around a few months ago if not recent, where someone Is working on some issue or points towards some documentation on it -> current users of "obsolete" systems and "unsupported" software for those models.
(of course for details on a specific issue just type it along in google)

win7 still in beta has already been tested on some "obsolete", "unsupported" or "below minimal configuration" hardware without mindblowing "no!" obstacles - compatible hardware (not museum pieces) such as Pentium M / P4 configurations some even with 512M ram, and this is only the ms world. - google it - the (few) issues mostly revolve around the graphic chip and some power management hotkeys

As for the nix* world if you just take some distro older than a few months and pop it in the drive of some machine, whatever would be that takes you to a halt you can just google on a browser and you will find documentations and forums taking you exactly to the answer you've been looking for. I didn't say it would be easy, but the answers Exist!

..as opposed to the ms world where you can learn that there is NO length resizing of the taskbar, EVER! no settings no tweaks, it seems to be a bar that will stretch from corner to corner on your screen forever! (you can just choose another desktop enviro that will never "please" xp completely) There is no perfect theme that will make All the programs obey it, there is no remedy to the crappy white window of Y!mess xcept some (perhaps crappier) imvironment, the is no official "restart shell" button in explorer and there never will be other than programs that do it, or whatever terminate method you prefer (junking some of your settings or not) etc etc.

Not to mention i've had the "pleasure" of seeing aero in action on radeon 9600xt 256M vram - between good and choppy! = crappy - that is the performance, opposed to whichever compiz on a linux distro that worked flawlessly and looking way better even on the mobility radeon 9000 with open source drivers, go ahead, test it!

ms is all about money, taking monopole and offering no choice, that i think we already know..

And now it seems there is NO fully working 2D acceleration for radeon 9000.. and i think i'll be testing some settings in those .inf files from the vista XDDM driver against the "official" xp one..

[bill bolton]

There are no common applications and software that do not run on a T40.

Oh, I didn't realise you were just trolling. Mea culpa

[p090]

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Troll

oh and let us not forget, what kind of bull***t operating systems have no "natural" way of "burning" a plain bootable iso on usb/memory card when almost any computer bios since P4 boards have the "boot from usb" function !??! not to mention the same operating systems still have no "live" version included other than making your own with the likes of pe builder or get one already built from someone else ?!

and i am Trying hard not to rant, so so hard

[kstuart]

There are no common applications and software that do not run on a T40.

Oh, I didn't realise you were just trolling. Mea culpa

Cutesy word play wll not obscure that you cannot come up with an example.

Quad-core, dual-channel, DDR3, PCI-E, etc. are all quantitative improvements, and only professional applications require the increased speed.

Netbooks and the $100 laptop for the third world project, are a clear recognition that most personal computers are used for reading and writing. The iphone has a single core underclocked to 412mhz.

[dsvochak]

It’s not reasonable to expect vendors to provide drivers and/or updated utilities indefinitely. And no, they probably don’t care, in part as “caring” would be unreasonable.

The choice is live with what you’ve got or upgrade. You make your choice and move on.

[john518]

7+ years is life expired in terms of the design envolope for mobile computing devices, which has all sorts of implications for supportability, which includes obtaining even general industry parts, such as 2.5" PATA drives, which are rapidly becoming (or already have become) unobtainable.

I have a problem with the above statement. I use 4 IBM laptops and 3 Mac laptops (G3 type) and Yes is is getting hard to get internal PATA drives for the laptops. In my case I use NDAS and USB externals. The Macs have FireWire so there are lots of drives that I can run. I have loaded Win7rc on a T42. The screen saver program does not work due to the video card limitations. When was the last time you burned an image in a LCD?

[kstuart]

... 2.5" PATA drives, which are rapidly becoming (or already have become) unobtainable.

Newegg has new 2.5" PATA drives available.

Going back to the topic, it is normal computer industry behavior to stop supporting older products, whether they be hardware or software.

However, we are not yet at that point with T40 laptops, or with Windows XP.

And while Windows 7 may have some nice features and improvements, there is nothing you can do with a 2009 laptop running Windows 7 that you cannot do with a T40 running Windows XP, (with the sole exception of some professional applications).