Just got my T61 delivered today!

Wow, it shipped from Hong Kong to my home in one day. I'm pleasantly surprised as it shipped before the estimated ship date, and got here in a jiffy.

I'm charging the battery right now and I haven't turned it on yet (I'm waiting till the charge is full). However, I opened the lid and I noticed a Windows Vista Home sticker below the keyboard. I had downgraded Vista to XP Pro when I configured it online. Doesn't the ThinkPad I ordered ship with XP Pro right out of the box then?

 

You didn't receive extra discs with your order?

 

I booted up the system for the first time and it was pre-installed with XP. I wonder why they put the Vista sticker on my laptop though.

Some first thoughts:

1. There isn't much bloatware that come with ThinkPads. I checked my desktop and the programs under Start and the programs installed were minimal. Still, I plan on reformatting with the disc using your XP clean install guide, Arkit3kt.

2. Setting up the fingerprint scanner was really easy.

3. The screen isn't very good, which is a disappointment. I've looked at pictures and they seem grainy? Am I right on this assessment? Is there any way to make the screen quality better?

4. I checked the size of the hard drive, and though I ordered a 250 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, my computer showed that there was a total of 226 GB of total space and 215 GB of free space. I know a certain portion of disk space is allotted for the OS formatting, but is that how it normally is? I was surprised it took up that much space.

5. I really like the build of this machine. The outer boxlike look is very businesslike and the keyboard is really nice.

 

The 226 GBs of total space is your 250 GBs that you ordered.

Just to clear things up, it is a common marketing scheme that is used in the computer world (its not specific to Lenovo). In tiny letters somewhere it will say 250GBs if you calculate 1MB to be 1,000,000 bytes.

In reality 1 MB is actually 2 ^ 20th bytes or 1,048,576 bytes. Anyways you end up with about 226GBs of free space.

 

kkSlider,

If you chose the discrete card option, you can adjust the screen brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. under the 'NVIDIA Control Panel' in Control Panel.

I also recommend using this as a guideline,

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

 

Ah, I have the integrated graphics. Does that mean I can't adjust anything?

 

Well, Adobe Gamma could help.

 

I think that all the 'shells' have the Vista sticker on it regardless of whether you get it installed with XPP or Vista. Also, I'm not sure if they would still carry any XPP stickers.

 

What pizdook wrote above plus the fact that you have a recovery partition, on the disk, that is taking up space and of course the OS and applications.