Windows XP on 410/420?

[Edward Mendelson]

I'm getting ready to replace my trusty T61 and T61p with T4x0 models, and can't find any "XP Downgrade" option on Lenovo's site for the models I've looked at.

Is it possible to do a fresh install of XP on these machines and use System Update (or manual driver installations) to get them to work well with XP?

Many thanks for any advice on this.

[Colonel O'Neill]

I'm pretty sure you can. Best to have an nLited copy of XP with the AHCI drivers slipstreamed though.

[craigmontHunter]

Yes, all the drivers are available online, so that should not be an issue. For a T420, you probably need to change the UEFI to legacy (or something) so xp recognizes it. The reason the downgrade disks are not availible anymore is because there was a time limit to how long they would be availible (IIRC, it was ~6 months after windows 7 came out) - downgrade rights are still applicable, but the manufacturer cannot provide the disks.

One thing to remember is that switchable graphics/optimus will not work in xp, you will have to run either dedicated or intergrated all the time, and you can only run 2 screens like that. IMHO, if you need basic xp compatibility, try Xp mode in windows 7 - it is a whole xp install, so it should be compatible with most programs, while you can keep the advantages of windows 7 as the base os.

[Edward Mendelson]

Thanks for both these replies - very valuable. I've got a nLited XP installation disk that I use to install XP on a modern motherboard with the Intel AHCI drivers; I hope that's sufficient.

My reason for running XP (probably in dual-boot mode) is that it allows DOS applications to run full-screen. XP Mode running inside Windows 7 doesn't permit that, unfortunately.

Thanks again. I'll post a report when I actually buy a new machine.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Could DOSBox work?

[Edward Mendelson]

Could DOSBox work?

Not well enough. I've spent many hours putting together a system that uses it, but I don't use myself, because straight XP is so much better. Details here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/wpdosbox64.html

[blackomegax]

why not just VM straight up dos?
or win98?

[Edward Mendelson]

why not just VM straight up dos?
or win98?

Reasons described at length here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/64bitwindows.html

and here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/virtualpc.html

XP lets a full-screen DOS window directly access documents anywhere on the sysem. All VM-based systems slow down performance, file access, etc., etc.

[blackomegax]

Ah. I guess to be actually helpful
410 has xp drivers.
420 does too, and the default EUFI setting should be good (it attempts both and always falls back to legacy without a UEFI os present, this would include the xp installer) AHCI is defaulted to on these days, though. so wrap the drivers in the disc or disable it.

[Edward Mendelson]

Ah. I guess to be actually helpful.

Yes! Thank you! Exactly what I was hoping to learn! Exactly!

I've got the Intel AHCI drivers wrapped into my nLite installer disk, and it worked perfectly on an Asus motherboard with a Sandy Bridge chipset, but I'll double-check before trying this on a T4x0.

Thank you again!

[blackomegax]

it will work. i just tested it on my old xp sp3 USB dongle install (easily modified with new drivers)

everything up to commit, anyway. (no disks handy to commit an xp install to)

forgot to add, on a T420 with bios defaults

[FragrantHead]

Edward, I skimmed your WordPerfect pages. The pre-emptive ripostes for smartass readers made me laugh.

I also use some DOS software daily, the Brief programmer's editor. It isn't the greatest program in the world, although ironically able and faster opening huge text files than Notepad or the Java-based jEdit program my colleagues use. Would you have a link (I've read the paragraphs titled "The reasons for this") explaining in more detail what significant advantages WordPerfect retains in this day over, say, MS-Word? Specific features, capabilities (macro language?) or overall elegant design? Just curious.

Going slightly off-topic, I also need to use 32-bit XP for various reasons. I had my Thinkpad T30 laptop image (Win2k at the time) virtualised with VMWare on a Core 2 Duo Macbook for a while. It had an Intel X25-M SSD, but as you say, the performance was disappointing. VMware indicated VT-x present, but it only ever felt like it matched the 6 years older T30 with a conventional disk. Still, the option of virtualising XP on my next laptop remains attractive. I am hoping XP mode under Win7 64-bit on the latest hardware with both VT-x and VT-d will be better. Would you have any perspective on that?

[Edward Mendelson]

Some people at the WPDOS forum at www.wpuniverse.com are very happy with XP mode under 64-bit Windows 7. I think it's terrible. There's no way to know whether someone will like it or not. It costs nothing but time to set it up, so you should give it a try and see whether it works.

I've never posted a list of reasons to use WordPerfect for DOS for more or less the same reason - no one is going to be persuaded by such a list, so it would just be a waste of my time to write it. In the real world, no one is ever going to switch to WordPerfect who hasn't used it already. The lack of long filenames and other Windows conveniences, the non-standard interface, and much else are enough to make it look archaic and weird to anyone who doesn't know why it's worth using. And I use it only for serious magazine/book writing and for letter-writing - for everything else I use Word.

I've tried to limit my site to information that can actually be useful to someone (and to those FAQs that I use to discharge my frustration at the absurd questions that come in).

[FragrantHead]

OK, thanks for replying though.

No, I wasn't considering a switch to WordPerfect for DOS. I am a software developer. Sometimes I see software that I think is really well conceived. One example would be RealDraw by a company called MediaChance. I have the impression it's written by one guy and considering that, I think it's really well done and surprisingly powerful. As a programmer it's a particular delight to see recursion applied in the way objects are packaged in that software. It suffers around the edges (or used to - I don't have the latest version), such as in import and export formats, but for me it highlights what one guy or a small team can accomplish when they have talent and focus on core functionality.

No, I don't work for MediaChance. I needed a way to create graphics for use in my web-based software. For the same price you can get programs thrown together from libraries that are very narrowly focused and not very flexible or you can get something like RealDraw, which I think has some serious thought behind it. I was curious to hear about WordPerfect from that perspective. Perhaps an old review of yours, available on the web?

And XP mode is terrible, because? I promise I won't argue. I'm really just curious to gather some of your insight. When I first saw XP mode, I thought what a big kludge it is. Barely more than a virtual PC, which means it gobbles up memory and disk space, you have to maintain two virus scanners and so on.

[Edward Mendelson]

I wrote about XP mode on PCMag.com back when it was still a release candidate:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346464,00.asp

There have been some minor improvements - it doesn't require hardware virtualization - but otherwise that account still seems right. But with free software like this, I don't think anyone should care about someone else's opinion. It's easy to try it out for oneself.

[FragrantHead]

Hi. I don't have much time right now, but skimmed your article. One thing that caught my eye was the slowness of DOS applications. I ran into a similar problem while installing the disk image of my Thinkpad on the Macbook. I used an old DOS-based version of Ghost to do so. Only VMWare ran it at a decent speed. As far as I recall both Parallels and VirtualBox were so slow that I calculated my 70GB disk image would have taken 3 days to copy. VMWare later had it's own problems though. The CPU usage for the whole machine (host and guest) would often go through the roof when displaying web-pages with Flash content. If you had the VM set up to use all CPU cores, you had no choice but to pull the power. The whole machine became unusable.

With so many corporate customers of ours going for virtual servers these days, I sometimes wonder why I find such serious problems. Desktop virtualisation presents a different set of challenges, I guess.