Clean Install Guide (works for 32-bit or 64-bit)

No "IF's" about it. That IS the case. When you go to your local retailer to buy Vista the money you are spending is not on the disk. It's the key code that you are buying. OK, sure you are paying for the disk, packaging, and everything else, but the activation/key code for the specific version is what you are buying. As stated in the F.A.Q. at the bottom of the guide. The key code is what determines the version and only that version can be activated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive As far as I know. Hybrid Hard Disks never caught on. I don't know of many available on the market. Basically it is a hard drive with a very larger buffer/cache. The standard hard drive usually has a buffer/cache of 8 - 16mb which isn't large enough to be considered a hybrid hard drive.

Turbo Memory actually performs a similar function as a hybrid hard drive. Turbo Memory acts as a large buffer for the hard drive.

Further, I should probably update the guide to be more clear. The bug fix doesn't actually disable hybrid hard drive. It actually just disables the power management associated with hybrid hard drive. So if you have Turbo Memory it will still operate normally with hybrid hard drive power management disabled.

 

Yes, every retail version contains every installable version. The disks might look physically different (i.e. the Ultimate might have "Ultimate" printed on the disk, or the basic might have "Basic" printed on it) but the content on the disk will be identical. However, the keycode provided in the Ultimate box will only activate Ultimate and the keycode in the Basic box will only activate Basic.

 

So are the upgrade version and the full version different in the same way? That is, physical disks are the same, keys are different?

 

Yes, ALL installation disks are identical in content. With the exception being there are 32-bit disks and 64-bit disks. Otherwise all 32-bit disks are the same and all 64-bit disks are the same. Despite the fact that they may have any number of different things physically printed on the disk. If you upgrade you are purchasing a new key.

EDIT: I should say ALL OEM, Retail, and anytime upgrade disks are the same. There are some disks from the MSDN that I have heard can not be used with the ABR utility. If you don't know what MSDN is, then you don't need to worry.

The only other exception being that soon there will be disks with SP1 integrated as well. Actually these disks are probably available now. Also, since someone will probably ask, I don't think there would be any advantage to re-doing a clean install with an SP1 integrated disk. If you have access to an SP1 integrated disk then by all means use it, but don't go out of your way to get your hands on an SP1 disk.

There have been lots of complaints from people who are unable to update via Microsoft Windows Update to SP1. Of course, Microsoft gets the heat for this. SP1 has been available to developers (and Lenovo) for months. It is the developers responsibility to adapt to service packs, IMHO. Anyway, I personally appreciate the fact that windows update will search your system and look for conflicts before attempting to install SP1. I didn't want to install SP1 if it was going to cause problems. After updating the UPEK driver, windows update allowed the installation of SP1. At least I updated with some confidence that my system didn't have any obvious conflicts before the update was applied.

 

Thank you both for the information. I understand now.

 

Can you be more specific about which MSDN disks work and which don't work with ABR, stallen? I downloaded the x64 /w SP1 image from MSDN, and I'm gonna use it to do a clean install with ABR. Do you know if it works?
Thanks.

 

Well I went back and created an iso bootable dvd using the 3 files (X13, boot, etc) and everything works flawlessly now. I guess I may have done something wrong when doing vlite but i appreciate you for helping me out and creating this awesome guide, thank you stallen

my computer boots much faster and shuts down much faster now.

 

Any "release" disc should work. Anything that needs a special developer key or something won't work. If you have access to MSDN downloads (which I don't and really don't know much about), you should be able to tell which is which.

 

I really want to get a thinkpad. but this whole nightmare of having to reformat and spend a year (for me) trying to get drivers and do a bunch of impossible stuff to get rid of all the crap that comes with the laptop seems way too much of a hassle.

there should be an option when you configure that says do not put turds on my PC.

oh well this will probably keep me from buying one since i dont have a year to devote to this project.

 

That's kind of a lame excuse stringer. It took me about 2 and a half hours to complete this guide and it was time well spent. I went from 78 processes on start up to about 56 before installing anything else.

Granted I missed a step, but it shouldn't take more than 3 hours to do everything. (make sure you read the FAQ about the hidden partition)

The vista installation was surprisingly fast, completing in about 35 minutes.

In reality, the bloatware on this lenovo was the slimmest I've seen among the dell's, sony's, and toshiba's I've played with. My girlfriends Toshiba, DAMN. That's all I have to say.

 

Yeah, it's really not that hard or take a lot of time, and it's well worth it. You'll also learn a bit about how a system is installed.

 

is there like, a reputable company that offers this service for a fee? because i have to work for a living.

 

You can probably take it to a computer shop and pay them to do a clean install for you.

 

I just did the clean install. Everything worked perfectly. But, after installing all the drivers(step 2), I have 3 devices in the Device Manager which have no drivers.

Is someone know what can that be?

I think I should install the drivers for the smart card reader but I don't know how. Is someone know?

Thank you for your help.

 

Wow, you must be incredibly busy to not be able to find about 3 hrs to do a clean install. I am a full time student, work full time, and a husband and father of two small children. Somehow I found 3 hours one day to do a clean install.

Anyway, as phaze said, this is not a problem with Lenovo in particular. This is very common amoung all major laptop/computer vendors. It's good in the sense that this bloatware is one of the reasons why Lenovo laptop prices have dropped significantly over the years. It's bad for the obvious reasons.

If you want to avoid bloatware all together you could get a Sager/Clevo, Compal, or Asus from a vendor such as:

www.GenTechPC.com
www.xoticpc.com
www.excaliberpc.com
www.milestonepc.com

I believe there custom built laptops are clean installs whereas the pre-configured models might have some bloatware. You will need to contact their customer support and make sure you get a custom built laptop with a clean install.

 

hello

I have follow clean install guide and everything works ok. I have r61 t8100

I would like to know what taskbar tool do you use for battery status, now I only have very small icon without any detailed info regarding battery status.

Previously I have icon with numbers from 1 to 100 and it was also bigger.

How to get this back ?

Thank you.

Best regards.

 

I think you are talking about ThinkVantage Power Management. As stated in the guide, you need the Power Management "Driver", but you do not need the Power Management "Utility".

I admit that the Thinkvantage Power Management "Utility" has a nicer battery icon and it is also more accurate than the battery status meter provided by Vista. I, personally, have avoided the Thinkvantage Power Management "Utility". It is just my appraoch to having a "Clean" install to avoid having any utilities that are not really required in order to avoid excess processes running in the background that can decrease performance and/or stability.

Any Thinkvantage Utility you desire can be downloaded and installed from the Lenovo downloads website. Just make sure that the utility is important enough to you to warrant a "hit" in performance and possibly even a stability. More information about "Thinkvantage" utilities is available in the F.A.Q. at the bottom of the guide. I personally recommend to go at least two weeks before installing any of these utilities so you can become accustom to the speed and stability of your system. Then you will see the difference it makes as you add the bloatware back in.

 

..........

 

I have a few questions that i'd appreciate some help with..

What is the difference between vista 32 and 64 bit? particularly in terms of performance and boot time.

I dled the vista 64 bit, but am using vista 32 bit. because of this i was not able to run the exe. instead of unzipped it and moved the .wim files into the system directory. however, i do not have a etfsboot file in the boot directory to run cdimage with... Edit: keep reading on the vista download page, there's a link

 

Anybody else getting the Readyboost partition of the turbo memory showing up as a drive letter with the ver 1.5 Turbo drivers? Keeps chiming in with a "drive full" warning, which is highly annoying... I turned off ready boost, which shut up the warning... but now I have this waste of space drive showing up.

Anybody know if there is a way to partition it to all be drive cache?

 

Thank you for answer, for now I will stay with vista icon. I thought that maybe some 3rd party appps (not thinkvantage) exsist which has better icon and does not take a lot of processing power.

Br

 

Hmmm... and for some strange reason Windows Experience Index is measuring everything but the graphics... getting 1.0 for both graphics component (Nvidia 570 - so it isn't the card).. was working fine before my clean install...

 

Ahh.. ok... from the release notes for the 1.00 version of the Turbo Memory driver

"For a volume which has a drive letter assigned, delete the volume via the Disk Management OS service (another option: open the GUI, disable ReadyBoost, and then restart the system), open the GUI, enable ReadyBoost support, and then restart the system."

good to go. Now I just have to figure out why WEI isn't working with the video card.

 

Eureka! Found the fix for the WEI score issue

http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/06/06/windows-experience-index-will-not-update.aspx

It occurs if you've run WEI, and then fixed the date/time on your system if the date/time was a future date/time - e.g. my computer thought it was the 28th, but it was the 27th.

 

Also, how can you tell if you have turbo memory or matrix storage manager?

Thanks, i appreciate it!

 

OK, I received my T61P with 4 GB RAM and Vista Ultimate (32). I am wanting to do a clean install with 64 bit so that all 4 GB will be recognized and utilized.

So I get to the FAQ at the end of Stallen's guide "• Can I download a 32-bit or 64-bit disk? Yes, you can download Vista 32-bit and/or 64-bit and create install disks from this website: MyDigitalLife http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/08/windows-vista-free-direct-download-link/" and am trying to follow the directions there. After downloading everything into a subdirectory off the C: drive (C:\Downloads\x64WinVista_direct\),

1. I run X13-49121.exe and allow Vista to "run" the file (Open File-Security Warning...Do you want to run this file? I say "RUN")

2. User Account Control asks me if I give the program "permission to continue"--I say "Continue"
Windows Vista Setup shows a progress bar, and then...

3. ERROR-- Windows Vista Setup Preparation : Cannot extract Windows Vista Setup to your hard drive. Please ensure that you can create files and folders in the same folder where VistaSetupPrep.exe was downloaded.

So the Vista folder was created, but I notice it is read only. Changing it back to R-W and then re-running the exe doesn't work. Neither does deleting it and creating my own Vista folder (R-W) and re-running the exe. The Vista folder I created is 3.53 GB and about 700 files.

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks.

* ijhutch *

EDIT:
Apparently, it's NOT possible to upgrade from 32-bit Vista Ultimate to 64-bit Vista Ultimate by downloading a 64-bit disc. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmarketplace/archive/2007/02/07/the-windows-vista-64-bit-upgrade-from-windows-marketplace-requires-a-64-bit-operating-system.aspx
Has anyone successfully done this?

EDIT2:
OK, used the vLite directions which say IGNORE the error message and apparently created the DVD. I have not used it yet, though, to verify its functionality.

 

So, I just got my Thinkpad yesterday and am thinking of doing a clean install. I don't want to bother with creating install DVD's, I would rather just use my USB stick to install Vista. I did a brief thread search, but couldn't come up with any answers. Is it possible? I would think it's the same, but just making sure the BIOS boots from the USB. I also found a link that seems to cover it pretty well. LINK My main concern is with copying the Vista install disk onto the drive. Will downloading the .iso, then loading it with daemonTools, then running a copy command from the virtual drive to the usb work? Hopefully this isn't too confusing. Thanks for any thoughts.

 

Folgerz--

1. Go to Start-->Computer and right click on it and select Properties.
2. Select "Device Manager" and allow it to open.
3. Scroll down to "Storage Controllers"
Mine says: "Intel(R) Turbo Memory Controller" and "Microsoft iSCSI Initiator"

Hope that helps.

* ijhutch *

 

Well, I created the 64-bit disc using vLite, then did the install (successfully). I was careful NOT to exclude any options during the making of the DVD.

After multiple WUs (Windows Updates) and reboots, it is finally giving me the SP1 update, published 3/18/2008. (whew)

* ijhutch *

 

OK, so just did the clean install. The difference is amazing. Thanks for putting this together Stallen. And now that I've done it I realize my USB idea wasn't useful.

Just for future users to know, but the FAQ on creating your own Vista disc is outdated and you should just download vLite to make the disc. Also, I was confused when it came to removing the partition, but I now understand that removing the hidden partition before or after are both the exact same process, but before is just "better". About to go do that.

Thanks again Stallen!

EDIT: Getting back partition after install didn't work, so I just redid another clean install. I would strongly recommend to remove the hidden partition ahead of time because if it doesn't work after the clean install(like for me), then you more or less have to redo the install.

 

there is no file on that url http://oembios.net/\filesets\68351C09.rar , or atleast I can't get anything from there.

can someone repost a link somewhere to this file please

 

nevermind the above post, I was being silly.

 

thanks for the great input.. when using vLite do you integrate your drivers? The program seems to be looking for INF files while lenovo includes TXT files. When i include them anyway it has unknown marked for all the fields.. did you just go along with that?

 

I didn't integrate my drivers. I just made the Vista disc with no changes because I've read that some people have problems when not using just a plain vista disc(not recognizing sp1 properly, etc...). However, the problem with some Lenovo drivers is that the file provided doesn't install the driver, it just extracts the files to a location. So you might have to run the lenovo driver for extraction. Although I don't have any experience with putting the drivers on using vlite so I'm not sure if that's what the problem is. Good luck.

 

for some reason my video drivers arent quite right.. i downloaded them off the lenovo driver webpage. and i cant control the screen brightness thru the function keys anymore.. does anyone know why?

Edit: I'm a noob. the lenovo drivers dont really install anything, they just decompress the real driver files that you need to use.

 

Quick question: My HD fried and received a replacement today, but I don't have recovery disks. I do have the ABR cert and key on a flash drive from my first clean install. I should be able to restore Vista using the anytime disks, right?

Just want to make sure before I start.

 

Yes, that should work just fine.

 

Just to open up possibilites here, but could it be your hotkey driver?

 

I'm getting blurred, thin text after the clean install. hard to explain what I see, but almost all text is thin and blurred, hard to read.

can't see any mention of it in this thread, or the entire message board for that matter..

drivers: updated
screen resolution: check
DPI: check (no effect)
ClearType on / off: no effect
Aero on / off: no effect
SP1: installed

a suggestion would be splendid,

 

If you are using a larger DPI make sure you mark the checkbox 'use XP style scaling' or something like that in the DPI settings menu.

 

I think ClearType is uncheck by default in IE advanced settings. Make sure to go into your Internet Options > Advanced Tab and check ClearType for HTML.

 

Go to the cleartype tuner (microsoft) web site and you can fix this problem.

Edit: Use Internet Explorer when doing this. It needs ActiveX

 

thanks everyone.. rep'd

power button -> firefox times

factory setup: 4:30
factory setup, tweaks: 2:30
clean vista install: 1:20
+ defrag: 1:10

turning of the gui boot screen really makes no difference.

core2duo 1.5ghz, 3gb ram, vista 64, AVG, gadget sidebar

 

I didnt get any vista discs, or upgrade anytime discs, and the link you gave to download your own isnt working anymore. Any suggestions?

 

They have been trying to track down the new download links in this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=240320
but it's not looking good.

 

Alright so I learned since I have ultimate I dont have the windows upgrade hidden anywhere on my computer, I have no vista discs, and those files are kinda MIA right now. Any other way I can go about doing a clean vista install?

 

I did a search on my new t61, and there is an Install.wim file there already. I'm attempting to make a new iso out of this file (since I can't download it anymore). Has anyone tried this before?

I should mention that I downloaded boot.wim and X13-49120.exe before they became unavailable.

 

With the download links currently down, what other alternatives are there for legally obtaining Vista install discs? Is there another site or a way to pull the data off of the HD?

 

Click on the link in Orev's sig (several posts up) for his clean install guide. He has several possibilities for downloading the files and making an install disk in his guide. If you find a good alternative for making an install disk, please report back so I can update the guide. Also, if you use the option that he describes by using vlite, make sure you do not remove any Vista features with vlite as that may interfere with updating to SP1.

 

Another happy customer checking in.

Since I was initially happy with the performance of the factory install, I was a little skeptical about the necessity of a clean install.
However, it really does make a dramatic difference, especially in startup and shutdown times. My startup and shutdown times are now about half of what they were with the factory install.

Thanks to this wonderful guide, the process only took a couple of hours and was quite painless.