| Windows XP RC1 on the ThinkPad A Series | |
| 1-july-2001 |
By: Zorro, The Masked ThinkPadder... |
| Ed. Note: The author contributes this sort of thing from time to time, via anonymous e-mail. | The author wished to remain anonymous. |
| Windows XP RC1 works very well on the A Series. It provides significant improvements over Windows 98 for Windows 98 users. Although I am not sure, I suspect that IBM has been working extensively with MS during the beta cycle for Windows XP to make XP as “ThinkPad ready” as possible. As a result of someone’s work, setting up Windows XP on a ThinkPad is quite a bit easier than setting up Windows 2000 or Windows 98 clean. | |
| Warning Before anything else, a word of warning. Do not run Windows XP, with a Windows 2000 NTFS drive in your ultra bay. Windows XP will convert a Windows 2000 NTFS v. 5.0 drive to NTFS v 5.1, and you will not be able to use the drive to boot to Windows 2000 without reformatting under Windows 2000 (which will destroy your data) and reinstalling everything. Don’t learn this the hard way. Windows XP will not do anything to a FAT32 drive in your ultra bay. |
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| Setup Booting from the Windows XP CD, a clean install of Windows XP Professional on an A20p with 384 MB RAM took less than 50 minutes. The program installed both sound and display drivers, and provided the correct (1400 x 1050) resolution. The only device driver that the MS CD doesn’t include is the IBMPM driver, but installing the latest Windows 2000 driver for this device completed the installation and provided warm swap functionality. Windows XP provides native support for the Intel Speed-Step power management, so it is not necessary to install the Intel Speed-Step Applet from IBM. However, the system will run as long, if not longer, on battery under Windows XP as under Windows 2000. |
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| Activation On the first boot after setup completes, Windows XP will detect whether your system is already connected to the internet (through a LAN, cable modem or DSL modem), and ask you whether you want to activate Windows XP. If you already are connected to the Internet, Windows XP will use that connection; otherwise, it will dial a toll-free number. Windows XP has a time bomb that will stop it from running if you do not “activate” in 14 days. (I am sure that, by the time you read this, script kiddies will have posted hacks that will defeat RC1 activation and make Windows think it is activated, but I leave that to them and any readers who are inclined to find and try these hacks.) |
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| Thinkpad-Specific and Other Applications After running setup of the operating system, users should install the ThinkPad Configuration Utility for Windows 2000 and, if your system includes a DVD drive, the Mediamatics DVD Express and latest upgrade from the IBM support web site. With the latest version of DVD Express, Windows XP will play DVD movies. The IBM Ultra Port Camera also works under Windows 2000 with the Windows 2000 drivers and Odyssey Multimedia program that came with the camera. The S-video in capture application (MGI Video Wave) that comes with come ThinkPads also works under Windows 2000. For any ViaVoice users, ViaVoice release 8 runs fine under Windows XP – as long as you don’t install Office XP, which will render ViaVoice inoperative. |
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| Advantages Booting, hibernating and resuming are much quicker under Windows XP than under Windows 2000. My A20P boots to GUI in 55 seconds (including 26 seconds for the system to run its POST and wait for me to choose a boot device) and hits the logon screen in 70 seconds – which is less than half the time that the same system takes to boot to the same stages under Windows 2000. It hibernates in 25 seconds and resumes in 46 seconds (also including the ThinkPad’s 26 seconds before the operating system begins to load) – again, much quicker than under Windows 2000. Windows XP comes in two flavors: Home Edition and Professional. The main difference is that Professional includes the networking overhead that lets a system join a domain and be managed by the domain administrator. Another difference – which is important to laptop users who travel with their systems – is that only the Professional version supports encrypting file system, which can keep a laptop thief from getting your data along with your machine. Of course, these are totally unavailable under Windows 9x/ME. The biggest benefit of Windows XP Home Edition for Windows 98 users is that it finally brings the stability of Windows NT and Windows 2000 to home users, since Windows XP is based on the Windows NT kernel. It really is stable. Hangs are rare. Another benefit is that it allows users to set up different user profiles on a system and, if the hard disk is converted to NTFS, to keep users from accessing (interfering with) one another’s settings and data. |
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| Install Clean or Upgrade? If you decide to try Windows XP, should you wipe your hard drive and install clean or should you upgrade? I strongly suggest that you save your data, wipe your hard drive, boot from the Windows XP CD, delete the original partition, create a new one, and format it with NTFS. What do you do with your data? Windows XP has a “files and settings transfer wizard” that will save all of your files and settings (including e-mail message stores from Outlook Express 5) and restore them after you have installed Windows XP. You insert the CD under your prior OS, select other tasks, and “transfer settings” and away you go. The wizard is stupid about one thing, though – it offers you the option of saving to floppies. Since even a minimal file is likely to be 500MB in size, most of us are unlikely to be satisfied saving to floppies. You are better off saving to a hard drive or network drive, and restoring from that; in fact, that may be the only practical way to restore if you have been using your ThinkPad for several months and have a lot of files and settings to save. After you run setup to install the new operating system, first create the user profile that you will use, and then run the files and settings transfer wizard under accessories > system tools to restore your files and settings. (Of course, don’t rely solely on MS and its files and settings transfer wizard; copy your My Documents folder and your application data folder, or under Windows 2000, your entire “Documents and Settings” folder). You also can upgrade either Windows 2000 or Windows 9x/ME, but you will need to uninstall or make SURE you have disabled all antivirus software programs, and Windows XP setup will give you many ominous-looking warnings that various IBM-preinstalled applications, and many of the drivers, are incompatible. Windows XP setup disables such software and installs its own, but generally does not delete the files, resulting in a waste of space. If you install the Home Edition as an upgrade to Windows 9x/ME, you will have the option to uninstall Home Edition and revert to your prior operating system. In my experience, the uninstall works pretty well. You probably will have to reinstall MediaMatics DVD Express after an upgrade over Windows 9x. |
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| Norton Anti Virus 2001 and NAV Corporate Ed v 7.51 install OK but a user needs to run the latest SEVINST.EXE patch from Symantec to get autoprotect to load. XP RC1 users should not install any components of Symantec Norton System Works other than NAV. This writer hasn't tried installing earlier versions of NAV. | |
| Roxio EZ CD Creator v. 5 installs and runs if users disable the Windows XP native CD burning capability, do not install the DirectCD and Take2 components of EZCD, and also add the latest Roxio patch (to v. 5.01, I think). Roxio is working on a 5.02 patch that will support all components in Windows XP, but who know when it will be posted. Installing EZCD v 5.0x DirectCD and Take2 will probably cause an endless loop of reboots each ending in a BSOD, which is not the intended "Windows XPerience." This writer hasn't tried earlier versions of EZCD with Windows XP RC1. | |
| Should you try it? In my opinion, Windows 2000 users should try Windows XP Professional or Home only if they need or want some of the applications that Windows XP provides, such as native CD burning or Movie Maker. Otherwise, Windows XP doesn’t provide enough improvements over Windows 2000 to justify the time you will spend recreating your system and explaining to your domain administrator how this really ISN’T an abuse of your local administrator privileges. Windows 9x users will see immediate benefits from Windows XP Home Edition – most prominently in stability. MS claims that installations of the released version as upgrades over RC1 will be “supported” meaning that they supposedly will work. We’ll see. For those who are interested, more technical details about the changes from Windows 2000 that are implemented in Windows XP can be found on the “Windows XP” link at: |
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It is NOT that I want to send you
elsewhere, but this is probably worth a peek.. :-) |
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