Aero / Win7 on T6x

[ArtShapiro]

I've been experimenting for several weeks with Win7 on a secondary partition of my main desktop machine. Unlike Vista, which I thoroughly detest, Win7 has been rubbing me the right way although I'm not yet ready to give up on the primary XP partition on that machine.

Today I ran the Windows 7 "Upgrade Advisor" on the most recent three of my Thinkpads, the T60p, the T61, and the X61.

To my surprise, only the X61 reported that it was capable of running the Aero interface for Windows 7. It is a Vista machine, whose "experience index" is 3.5 due to that particular value for the graphics. Apparently that's sufficient for Aero.

But I thought the T60p (2007-94U) was a reasonably powerful machine. The video is a "ATI Mobility FireGL V5200". I am under the vague impression that it is a generally decent, if not spectacular, graphics card (or whatever the correct term is for a laptop!).

Don't know if I have any specific question to pose - presumably the M$ rating is what it is, and nothing is going to change it. But I'm curious if there's anything I can do to up the assessment of the T60p's video. This certainly lessens the aesthetic appeal of Windows 7, if I were to decide to purchase it for these laptops.

Art

[Harryc]

All of the machines you mentioned are Aero capable, despite what the advisor may or may not indicate. I am running it on my X60.

[choekstr]

I am running Win7 64 bit on a T60p Core2Duo with ATI FireGL 5200 graphics. Here are my "Windows Experience" scores:
Overall: 4.3
Processor: 5.0
Memory: 5.0
Graphics: 4.3
Gaming Gfx: 4.4
Primary HD: 5.3

Overall it feels very similar to Vista in speed; although after 2 months of running the RTM version it is feeling much more sluggish than when first installed. Aero is so not an issue to run as there is plenty of horsepower for the full Aero window manager.

My model is only a couple years old (8744-C9U) so I expect it to run any OS out there and so far I haven't been let down.