Abdul Bijur V

The Lenovo T61 comes preinstalled with Vista and a whole lot of shareware software and tons of spyware. My new laptop used to take about 3 minutes to boot and become completely usable.

It has tons of registry fixes and you will not able to upgrade any of your video driver or anything at all . It comes preinstalled with Office 2007, win DVD, Diskeeper, Tom Dick and all the other harry’s. Of course none of them the full software. Vista has really bad handling of wireless networks and long long boot up time and hogs your system resources and .. and .. and .. i could go on and on. Then I saw this on CNET as they rated Vista as the worst technological product of 2007

Windows Vista
Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor’s reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.

So I decided to get this trash out of my sexy laptop and install one of the best things that MS has ever come out with. MS XP. Here is how you can go about it.

First things first:

Take a backup
Take a backupof allimportant data on the laptop.

Make product recovery discs
You could make product recovery discs by going to thinkvantage -> create product recovery disks.
This would take 1 CD and then 8 other CD’s for the complete product recovery disc creations. Or if u have a dvd writer, it would take 1 CD and 2 DVDs.

Understanding the Lenovo partitions
The Lenovo hard disk is usually partitioned into a single visible partition. But there is another hidden partitin with the product information on it. Its a 6 GB partition. If you have created the 9 Recovery discs then we can and need to knock off this partition when we install xp. You can either create a single partition or as you please when you install xp.

Once the recovery discs are done, install XP from the product discs. Once the base xp is installed. You should install the following.

The Drivers page of Lenovo has drivers for chipset, video, audio, power-managment and the hard disk utility and hotkeys driver from that page and you are golden.

Vista had real poor sleep-wake times and it used to take an aweful lot of time to resume once i had closed my laptop lid. Now things are much faster. I get really short boot up times and to be honest, I dont reboot at all now because my laptop goes to sleep and wakes in no time at all making it all the more easier for me to manage.

Tags: lenovo, t61, vista, xp