| Vista Beta 2 on T60p I performed a clean installation of Vista Beta 2 Ultimate Ed. on my ThinkPad T60P. Before the installation, I removed the original hard drive (with XP and all of my apps and data) and replaced it with a new 2.5" SATA HDD, booted from the Vista DVD, and installed. I also copied to a CD the C:\ibmtools and c:\Drivers folders from the original hard drive. The installation took a little over an hour. While Win2000 and XP built the OS for a system, Vista copies a generic image to the HDD, expands the files, and boots before configuring the system for a particular hardware configuration by adding drivers, etc. Vista detected all the hardware and provided drivers for almost all the devices including the display, the SATA hard drive, and both wired and wireless NICs. After the install completed, opened device manager, right clicked on each device with a mark by it, and had Vista search for the device first online and then in the directories I had copied to CD as described above. Vista searched folders on the CD to obtain the drivers for the Atmel TP device, the IBM PM (power manager), and many (but not all) components of the Sierra Wireless Modem. Vista searched online and came up with drivers for the biometric processor and fingerprint reader although I haven't yet tried the FP Reader with the drivers Vista provided. I was able to install and use the Lenovo-provided Keyboard Configuration and HotKey utilities. Most Lenovo applets won't run (and generate an error code saying unsupported OS) unless you first right click on them and set them to run in XP SP2 compatibility mode. |
Many of the Lenovo
Applets (e.g., Access Connections) just won't work with Vista. As a result,
users are left with the a/b/g WiFi radio on all the time. You can use the
hotkey FN+F5 to shut down the radio and bluetooth only if you use the Lenovo
drivers, but in one Beta2 install the Lenovo drivers for Intel 3945a/b/g
wireless NIC caused the NIC to turn off and to become "access denied" when I
tried to roll back the drivers (requiring a re-install). The Lenovo UNAV driver package won't install at all - it generates an ominous error message that I have never seen before (and that disappeared too quickly to write down) and caused the trackpoint and mousepad to stop working. I was able to roll back the driver to PS2 mouse by booting into safe mode and "updating" the driver to the one indicated in C:\windows\inf. I am unsure whether the Vista-supplied intel ICH7 storeage drivers are correct as the devices have different names in Vista Device Manager and I haven't figure out which device to "update" to the Lenovo-supplied ICH7 drivers. It seems that the SATA HDD I/O performance is lower in Vista than in the Lenovo Preload, which is likely a driver problem. I say this because the system hibernates and resumes more slowly in Vista. I have not yet tried a fresh XP install from the Recovery CDs and upgrading to Vista from there to see how thing work. I will look forward to hearing the results of others' attempts at this scenario. To comment on this article, please go to the thinkpads.com forum. here for the forum here for this article on the forum. |