any problems installing Vista on an X41?

[nomadmatt]

i can get my hands on to Vista Business is there problem with installing it on my x41t? i have 1.5g of ram so ram should not be a problem.


edit 41 instead of 40

[mikb261]

I am running Vista Ultimate on my x41. I have 1 gig of ram. Only real difference I have noticed is a longer startup and shutdown time. Overall I would say the OS runs fine.

[NoCleverName]

I've been running Vista on my X41 since Beta 2...
You will probably notice a drop in battery life, longer shutdown times (Vista boots faster than XP does for me), and periodic slow-downs.
The hard drive in the X41 is very, very slow and Vista likes to work your hard drive quite often.
X41 cannot run Aero, so the interface is not nearly as pretty as it is on more capable machines.
X41 SD reader does not seem fast enough to make use of ReadyBoost (has anyone got it to work?)
X41 HDD is not only slow, but very small - Vista is huge, and system restore has a nasty habit of filling up your hard drive with redundant backups.

Do your homework and strip out unnecessary services and you can recover most of the speed you'll lose to Vista. Having the RAM maxed out like you do is the most important thing, but seriously: do some reading about services and try to eliminate unnecessary ones. Check out Vlite - it is a program that allows you to make a customized install of Vista, so you can strip out alot of bloat before you ever install it.

Hope this helps. For the record, despite the above problems, I have loved Vista. I'm about to do a fresh install with a retail copy, finally... I'm still using RC1!

[nomadmatt]

What battery time do you get?
Have you gone back to XP? if so is it easy?
i need to wait till end of term before i install vista.

[marka2k]

NoCleverName

I have ready boost working with Vista on my X41T what kind of issues are you experiencing?

[marka2k]

Nomadmatt

Do what I did get another hard drive and keep XP on it takes less than 5m to swap out :)

[nomadmatt]

i do not have the money for a new hard drive right now. :(
install went good. i am liking vista right now. i do not see what people have agenst vista

[marka2k]

Culture shock, looks different and not everything is where it was. Also there is a performance hit. I don't relish having to upgrade my users to Vista will keep XP as long as possible for them.

[mikb261]

As I stated above I was running Vista Ultimate. I have now reverted back to XP Tablet edition. Now that I have gone back to XP I realize just how much slower my tablet ran with Vista as the OS. In my opinion using vista on an x41 is a mistake.

[Fox5]

I concur that Vista on the x41t is a Bad idea.

I like vista, and I like the stuff it adds for tablets but...
It's way way way too slow.
Kills battery life.
Overworks the harddrive. I believe its indexing service killed mine.

Oh, I did get the SD card input to work with readyboost though. I got a 4GB transcend card and had to format it as NTFS before it would work though. Fat32 just wasn't fast enough.

On a side note, Ubuntu runs great on the tablet and even supports the digitizer.

[cromas]

quote:Originally posted by marka2k

Nomadmatt

Do what I did get another hard drive and keep XP on it takes less than 5m to swap out :)


Careful with that -- I remember that some of the official X41 documentation (possibly the maintenance manual?) says the hard drive connector on the X41 is not designed for a large number of insertions and will fail quickly if used in a drive-swapping setup.

Seems to me they should have just replaced the connector, since they were already anticipating the problem, but hey, this is Lenovo, not Apple =(