I recently installed Vista on my ThinkPad T60 and am happy to report that it’s been a net positive experience. That said, it’s probably not an undertaking that I’d recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a specific need to run Vista, or to anyone who doesn’t consider themselves to be a pretty hardcore Windows hacker.

Why did I do it?

• I just had to try it
• The laptop, when it was still running XP, would routinely fail to Hibernate due to a bad driver. I’m not sure which driver was causing this, but no further attempt to hibernate could be made until after a reboot. I had read that Vista handles power state change a little differently – namely, that drivers aren’t offered the option to prevent the hibernate attempt, which makes a lot of sense to me. Don’t remember where I read that, although this Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista) vaguely references the changes .
• Out of the box, ThinkPads come with tons of optional software installed, much of which periodically tries to download updates and/or phone home. Attempts to un-install some it resulted in breaking other things, including some Java runtime component that would run and crash every time I logged in. Objectively, I suppose there’s an army of business users out there who find the ThinkPad software suite to be a real value-add, but I found the lack of control to be annoying.

An aside – once I had resolved to clean install the OS, I did try XP first. Unfortunately, the required (presumably) SATA harddisk drivers aren’t available in the default XP media (not surprising, given its age). Complicating the matter is that I don’t have a floppy drive, so adding a 3rd party driver during text mode setup was intially going to be impossible. I assumed that resorting to the Lenovo system restore media would result in the same un-wanted additional software getting installed as well, so that wasn’t an option. Thus, rather than completely punt on the clean install, I decided to try Vista (which provides the proper SATA driver out of the box!).

Results

Again, having completed the upgrade and re-installed most of the apps, I’m happy to say there have been no major problems. Here’s a summary of what I’ve experienced.

Pros

• Hibernate works better now, although resume is a little flakey. I haven’t had a crash yet (I once had the wireless NIC driver for my old Toshiba, running XP, crash the disk during resume from hibernation, so I’m always nervous about this). Seems like Vista will occasionally resume and then immediately hibernate again. This may also be related to whether the laptop screen/lid is open or closed.
• When working on new Vista-specific development projects, I can run tests directly from Visual Studio 2005 (which seems to work just fine for my scenarios, despite the fact that the installer reports known compatibility issues with Vista. I believe the latter are actually SQL desktop engine-related.), without having to copy them over to a separate Vista test machine.
• From a network security perspective, system discovery/ICMP and file sharing are blocked by default by the Windows Firewall on Vista. While some knowledgeable users may be confused by this, and changes to the control panel make it initially frustrating to configure, I nevertheless applaud it!
• Vista looks cooler than XP, what with the Aero/glass interface. Personally, I think they could have done a better job on the blue-green sheer fabric-looking secure desktop screen, but otherwise I dig it.
• My Verizon broadband card and software actually works. This is the one thing that I thought was going to totally screw me after the upgrade, but it didn’t!

Cons

• The VeriSign Digital ID enrollment web site doesn’t support Vista clients yet (since Vista/IE7 won’t load XEnroll, VeriSign needs to port its web enrollment logic over to the new CertEnroll interface). The Microsoft PKI guys told me they’ve been providing support on this, but I don’t have an ETA.
• The ThinkPad originally came with some nice add-ins for managing the docking station and video settings. I don’t know how to get that back, and I certainly don’t want a bunch of extra stuff with it.
• Virtual PC won’t run at all. Presumably this is due to session separation in Vista. Anyway, VMware supports Vista just fine, but I still have some images that I haven’t upgraded from VPC.
• The Adobe Acrobat download site actually has a special page and download version for Vista, which is admirable. But it didn’t work! From a my brief investigation, it appeared that the installer was being sandboxed, and was attempting to write elsewhere to the disk. The only way to proceed was to copy the temporary installation fails elsewhere, and then run the setup program directly. Complicating matters was that the top-level installer would always clean up after itself on failure. Anyway, you can find the temp setup files before the installer completely fails out.
• My Raritan SwitchMan USB COMBO KVM still doesn’t work. I had hoped that upgrading might fix the problem, whatever it is, but it didn’t. In summary, when I plug my keyboard and mouse directly into the docking station (via USB), everything works fine. But when I route them through the KVM, no luck. There’s a Dell desktop sitting next to it that has no problem w/ the KVM. Anyone else seen this issue with the Raritan and/or Lenovo?

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