First, i perfer vista to 7 on my T60 due to the 1024x768 screen, vista seems more suited for it. Second, i like having vista on it to show off how decent the OS actually is, since most people dismissed it as windows ME the second. Also this is my first guide type post ever. so sorry if it seems a bit badly written in spots.


Now for the guide

Before you do anything make sure you have a USB stick with Autopatcher for vista on it,
thinkvantage system update on it as well. This will make the setup a lot easier. Make sure you include the intel INF update utuility it makes it a lot easier on you to have that. Also if needed include vista SP1 and SP2 on the USB stick as well as the optimized GMA950 drivers from http://forum.9xxssf.info/ they do improve performance.

Now, when setting up vista make sure you have the right SATA drivers, if it has trouble detecting your drives just put the drivers on the USB stick and use that. I have had this issue with Vista RTM on a dell with a ICH8M SATA chipset, the T60 uses a ICH7M.

Upon finishing the install of the operating system, Install the latest Intel INF installer driver and the video driver, reboot. Now run autopatcher only after you confirm you have SP2 installed. Let it go to work installing everything. After those updates are done, connect the thinkpad to the internet now that you have most security updates installed. Install thinkvantage system update and let it go to work.

Now comes the fun part, tweaking vista. after you have everything updated and all the drivers installed, open the intel graphics properites and go to the power manager, set it to either off or minimum so you can use aero with no performance penalty, second go to 3d settings and tell it to use high memory footprint. That will let it use the full 256mb that Vista/7 allow the GMA950 to use (xp is limited to 224mb, small advantage to vista/7). Now i disable windows firewall, windows defender and UAC for annoyance and performance reasons (at least iwth defender) another tweak, if you do not do many hard drive searches, turn off the indexing service, as well as the spooler service if you never do anything printer related, even create PDF's. Finally double check your hard drive to make sure advance performance is enabled, if not enable it.


With these tweaks your T60 will be able to run vista, and even 7 perfectly, i feel vista is as fast as Xp for the most part.

Other reccomendations:

Ram, Max it out at 3 GB...no reason not to
CPU: stick with Xp if you have a Core solo...vista may lag quite a bit on it.
Hard drive: be aware that vista uses more HDD space than xp. My 60gb is somewhat cramped with vista on it. Also, 7200RPM drives are a decent idea to have with vista/7 to cheaply increase performance.

my system with firefox,AIm,MSN,MIRC,Yahoo,Vista Aero fully enabled only uses about 50% of my physical memory with 75 processes. and it is still pretty fast even at that state

Sorry if any info here was repeated, but is saw several xp guides and 7 guides on the internet and felt that vista deserved to be remembered.

Nice guide.

I share your opinion that Vista is not as bad as many people made it up to be. I still use it on my primary desktop. Interestingly, on these forums, I find people generally less biased against it.

About SATA - if you switch the SATA controller to IDE/Compatibility mode in the BIOS, you should not need any drivers for installation. It is always possible to install the drivers later and switch to AHCI, if one wants. Strangely I don't remember needing anything special to install Vista in AHCI mode on my desktop (P45/ICH10).

I would actually advise against disabling the firewall, especially on a laptop, that is bound to be used for connecting to various strange networks from time to time.

I was running vista on my laptop, untill I got 7 from my school (I may go back, thanks to the dumb wifi settings that don't work) - Either way, I believe that vista is designed to use 1/2 your ram all the time - which is a good thing, since it improves os performance while leaving space for programs - if you open something that needs more ram, it will lower its use.

I agree with dr_st, the firewall should probably be left on, since laptops are connected to strange routers, and even if the router has a firewall built in, that is no help if there is someone on the lan doing something funky.

I leave the firewall off on my home network

It's good to see that there are now four forum members who like Vista! I prefer it over both 7 and XP mainly because it has the best user interface. Both my main computers at work and at home use 64-bit Vista.

For Pentium M and older computers with ≤2GB RAM, Vista is probably significantly slower than 7 and XP, but for more modern computers, I haven't had any performance issues.

only downside to vista, it takes forever to boot, which is a small problem for a laptop.

Every Windows OS can take either a very short time or a very long time to boot, depending on what you have installed. Vista is no exception.

I agree. In my office, my secondary desktop (1st-gen Core i5, 6GB DDR3 RAM) has 64-bit Win7 and it takes longer to boot than my primary desktop which runs 64-bit Vista (Core2 Extreme, 4GB DDR2 RAM).

It is not really a matter of liking it, but because the Thinkpad it came with had a proper license for it, i just take it as it is. I wouldn't want to bother investing any money in any more current Windows as i don't really work with it anyway. I mostly use Linux for 99,9%, but still consider it useful to have any kind of Windows around for unforeseen circumstances. For that limited purpose Vista is plenty good enough.

Great guide for Vista, personally I think Vista is all right too, I prefer it to XP. I used Ultimate x64 for about a week or so on my main desktop machine until Christmas Day when I reinstalled with Windows 7 Ultimate (Core i5 760, 128GB Crucial M4 SSD, 8GB DDR3) and it ran pretty fast, but even on the SSD it wasn't too fast to boot (but certainly not slow either), Windows 7 is faster at booting. I still use Vista Ultimate 64-bit in a VM for software testing and it's quite nice.


I ran Vista 32-bit on an Athlon 64 3700+, 80GB IDE HDD and a GeForce 6600GT AGP for a while quite happily. Went back to XP in the end as it was faster. Also tried Windows 7 on this machine and it runs all right but I'd say XP was best. I remember running Vista on Pentium 4s and 2GB RAM as well all right.


If you want to speed the boot speed up on the multi-core machines you can tell Windows to use all available cores when booting. Go to Run and type in msconfig, then go to Boot, then click Advanced Options, check the box that reads Number of Processors and select the highest number. Apply and reboot. You might also want to disable things from starting up at startup too. I have everything disabled apart from my anti-virus software.