T42 and Windows 7 RTM: My Experience

[jmcafee]

System Specs
T42 2379
1.2 GB RAM
1.6 GHz Pentium M
FP Reader
Intel 2200BG wireless
ATI Radeon Mobile 7500
Windows 7 RTM x86 installed as dual boot with XP SP3

Preparation
Download the following drivers (32 bit/x86 where appropriate) from the Lenovo Windows 7 Beta site and store on the hard disc. The current URL is http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... =WIN7-BETA.

System Interface
Hotkey
Power Management Driver
Power Manager
UltraNav Driver
UltraNav Utility
Fingerprint Reader (mine is the UPEK)
Active Protection
Access Connections

You could optionally download the Trusted Platform Management drivers for Vista 32 (from the normal d/l URL); if not, you will have bang in the device driver "Other" section.

I suggest NOT using downloaded XP drivers for the wireless (it will work in a pinch) as Access Connections seems to have a fit with this driver.

Note there are no display drivers. Some users have tried the XP or Radeon 9000 drivers with some success; I get a BSOD after a minute or 2 or complete lockup depending on the driver.

Basic Installation
Performed several different installs, including from a DVD and off the hard drive. In this particular setup you cannot install to the C: partition from files based on the hard drive (rather than the DVD) if you want to preserve the OS currently booted on drive C:. Fiddling with drive letter re-assignments via Disc Management from Win7 provokes "Parameter is incorrect"; I couldn't shuffle letters when booted to XP.

Installation is amazingly quick and painless, with very little user interaction. Far superior to XP.

System State on First Bootup
Your display will be driven by a generic driver. The default resolution is 800 x 600; manually bump it to the highest setting.

Connect to Windows update via a wired ethernet connection. Install ONLY the driver offered for the Intel 2200 BG Wireless; ignore for now any other driver offered.

Now install the Lenovo drivers that you downloaded, roughly in the order listed above. There are some drivers that need to be installed prior to others (Access Connections should be near the last and after the wireless driver), but I believe the order listed above will work OK. Some packages will install files to C:\DRIVERS, and you will need to install the drivers from that location. You can accept the offer to reboot when some drivers are installed; sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't and it didn't seem to matter.

There are about 4 drivers that will prompt you for the OK to run when the desktop is initialized after bootup. I enable the option to run these without my permission; otherwise you will be prompted at every bootup.

Peformance
I haven't run any benchmarks, but Win7 performs exceptionally well and comparible to XP with the exception of the video. The generic drivers are a pit and will curtail performance and video capability. You will not have Aero available.

There are very few glitches: some video scrolling jitter as I write this post; Firefox 3.5 periodically locks up (not IE8) when scrolling a page, but I expereince the same thing on a T400 so I wonder if it is an issue with Firefox rather than the trackpoint.

System Sleep is not available, just Hibernate. I wonder if it is an issue with the generic video driver.

Remember that YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY!

Good luck.

[elee123]

i too have had good luck with the t42 windows 7 rtm experiment.

i had vista on it when i bought it, but people kept saying how windows xp would be so much better on it.

put xp sp3 on it, and was generally fast. however, i had tons of problems with wpa2 and win xp as well as the sound card stuttering when scrolling web pages. i did like how little hard drive space xp uses compared to vista and w7.

put windows 7 pro on it on sunday and have been addicted to it. it feels like a new laptop i have the radeon 9600 so i get all the aero features. booting, suspend, hibernate all work and work well. i never install virus protection to keep things speedy. i've gotten drivers for all my devices. the majority were installed thorugh windows update after plugging in the lan cable (wlan, sound, gfx card, fingerprint reader). only one, the tpm i had to hunt down.

[mgo]

My R52 (a distant cousin to your T42-possibly) also runs really well with Windows 7. I was able to get the XP version of Keyboard Customizer to work well (no Windows key on the R52 -and CTRL+ESC annoys me) and now I can just use the right ALT key to launch Start like before.

Also, Bluetooth really works well. Bluetooth on XP and Vista were uber-clunky, but on Windows 7 it just took off with little setup hassles. I can easily transfer files and things from Windows 7 machine to Windows 7 machine. The protocol is still pokey, but with Robocopy it makes a great updater and backup.

Some ThinkPad features will not be carried over to Windows 7. See this article:

http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=270

"Windows 7 and ThinkVantage Technologies"

[jmcafee]

Update to my OP.

Display driver update SUCCESS!

I obtained Vista drivers for the ATI 7500 from http://k1dugar.110mb.com/~downloads/atiixpag.zip as discussed in this thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 5390dd059c. Please be aware that any file that you download from an independent source is used at your own risk. I could not find any reports that these drivers were hacked or contained malware, nor did NIS 2009 identify any. This might have been a driver formerly posted to the Vista Beta section of IBM, but I cannot be certain.

This driver works magic to improve the performance over the standard VGA (WEI graphics now 1.9), and now makes my T42 with Win 7 RTM a worthy production machine. The system Sleep mode now works. The graphics performance is comparable to XP, and I have yet to encounter a bug (but still expected).

The key to installation is to accurately follow: Device manager -> Display Adapters -> <RMB the installed driver> Update Driver Software -> Browse My Computer -> Let Me Pick -> Have Disk -> <browse to folder with the downloaded driver> "atiixpag.inf" -> <follow instructions to complete the installation>. I installed mine from the Safe Mode, but I don't know if it is required.

[2think]

jmcafee, thanks for posting your observations of your migration from XP 32 bit to Windows 7 X86 (32 bit). I did not see the size of your Hard Drive. I see that you have both OS's on your hard drive.

• How big a hard drive are you using?

• How big is the partition for Windows 7?

• What min capacity hard drive would you recommend to install and run Win7 32 bit with office 2007 32 bit if you only have Windows 7 OS and do away with XP Pro?

• Any reason why you did not use Microsoft Migration Tool Kit MDT 2010 to migrate XP to Windows 7

Thanks

[jmcafee]

I see that you have both OS's on your hard drive. How big a hard drive are you using?

80GB Hitachi 7200 RPM

How big is the partition for Windows 7?

Rather small, about 20 GB. This is about 40% larger than my XP boot partition. Ultimate 7 will complain at install if the partition is less than about 13 GB, though I've installed OK on 11 GB.

I size the boot partitions small, and put vitually everything else including Docs and Desktop on separate data partition that is shared by all OS's and backed up.

What min capacity hard drive would you recommend to install and run Win7 32 bit with office 2007 32 bit if you only have Windows 7 OS and do away with XP Pro?

It could be easily done with on 60GB drive with plenty of room to spare. Rather than worry about drive size (storage is dirt cheap), perhaps a more relevant question is drive speed. I've run both 5400 and 7200 RPM drives -- no brainer here.

I also store the installation discs for all programs on the data partition, so for me an 80GB drive is a great fit. In fact, I often keep large segments of drive space unpartitioned, probably not necessary with modern drives and OS's, but is an old habit beginning back in the early 1980s to keep file fragments from getting scattered across the disc.

Any reason why you did not use Microsoft Migration Tool Kit MDT 2010 to migrate XP to Windows 7

I tried it on one of 4 machines, but found it rather useless. It took quite a while to run, and the migrated settings and profiles didn't amount to much. It will copy the documents, music, etc.; but in my schema that I've used for 25 years these are already on a partition that is independent of any OS.

[2think]

I size the boot partitions small, and put vitually everything else including Docs and Desktop on separate data partition that is shared by all OS's and backed up.

It will copy the documents, music, etc.; but in my schema that I've used for 25 years these are already on a partition that is independent of any OS.

Thanks for the pointers. If I were to place docs in a data partition, how do I make it sharable to more than one OS? what program do you use to create these partitions?

[jmcafee]

Thanks for the pointers. If I were to place docs in a data partition, how do I make it sharable to more than one OS? what program do you use to create these partitions?

As long as the file system is recognized by the OS, the OS used to create the partition is immaterial. All Windows OS from 2000 on will read/write NTFS, the best file system for Windows. There are NTFS drivers for Linux and DOS, and even hacks for the Mac.

You can create, size, and manage the partitions using the Windows Disc Management console (right mouse click the Computer desktop icon, then select Manage). Commercial programs include Acronis Disk Manager. Open source (free) programs include GParted.

[6SPDSER2002]

OMG love you guys.....i am running Win 7 OEM and my sleep finally works...bout to test video