New T400 Lenovo Windows “Enhanced” Experience Mini-Review

I purchased a T400 about a year ago—and am very pleased with it. This T400 was subjected to Lenovo’s poor engineering practices with regard to the keyboard—and Lenovo shipped me a T61 keyboard as a replacement gratis—so problem solved.

Well, I just purchased another T400 for another purpose—and here are my brief thoughts on it compared to my original T400, which is a clean Windows 7 installation (in no noteworthy order):

• Keyboard is good—not as good as my T61 replacement, but good enough (someone tell Lenovo to stop mucking with a good thing)
• Access Connections is VERY pretty and informational, but it appears to cause data packet latency to increase (Power Manager and Advanced Driver settings are nearly identical between the two machines)—no wonder I didn’t install it when I did a clean install on my original T400. The Access Connections also has a pretty Windows 7 Taskbar curve (like the Power Manager), but it becomes a little annoying and oversized when the Taskbar is not on the bottom of the screen. Is this curve all that is part of the Lenovo Windows “Enhanced” Experience?
• The new T400 with the Lenovo Windows Enhanced Experience sticker’s boot time (from power on to logon screen) is ~30 seconds for me. My T400’s Lenovo Windows UNENHANCED? Experience boot time is also ~30 seconds (please know this is actually not a very fair comparison as this machine is also doing BitLocker encryption). What’s so enhanced about the Enhanced Experience here?
• Systems Update 4 is nice. It has some Windows 7-isms—and is a nice tool overall.

I’m not sure what else to look at in terms of identifying my Lenovo Windows Enhanced Experience. I guess what I’m trying to get at here is, really, what is this Lenovo Windows Enhanced Experience (outside of just marketing and a sticker)? Is it just some updates to Lenovo tools to support Windows 7? If so, isn’t this an expected step for most notebook manufacturers? If I’m missing something/misunderstanding something, someone please clue me in.

Cheers.

 

Marketing. Loonovo is mainstreaming the TP line in a subtle way. The Toolbox thing is an annoyance IMO.

 

To me, if you're getting similar bootup times with EE then that is a good thing. For too long Windows has become more and more bloated with preinstall apps and whatnot. If a factory image is as fast as a clean install then maybe the days of clean installs are soon over (sans the people like me who will insist on a clean install anyway)

 

My new X301 came with that little "enhanced experience" sticker next to the windows 7 sticker. What does that mean anyway ? Are they now special because they have that sticker ? (Kinda like how some people put performance enhanced stickers on thier cars, each sticker adds 10+ HP). lol

 

According to Lenovo, your X301 is "better,nicer,more enhanced" than the X301 I purchased a year ago. The sticker itself makes your laptop twice as valuable as mine, so don't remove it under any circumstances.

 

I just received an X301 with Enhanced Experience certificate. I have the 64 gb SSD. Even after reclaiming the space taken by the Rescue and Recovery, there's only 40 gb left.

Should I reformat and reinstall Windows 7? How would a reformat affect the Enhanced Experience? For those of you with EE, did you reformat your ThinkPad? Thanks!

 

Shouldn’t notice any difference—EE is, largely, just marketing. Just install the Lenovo drivers from the web site.

Of course!

 

Thanks for the quick response!

I've made a copy of the rescue and recovery disks. Can anyone provide a quick instruction on how to go about a clean install using these disks? Thanks

 

I thought the "Enhanced Experience" versions have less crapware installed, no virus scanner trials and AOL icons floating around. Hence the "fast" boot, that is, comparable with a fresh install.

 

I believe EE refers to EFI vs traditional BIOS, which allows for faster boots.

 

As much as I would love to see EFI and GPT, the remaining Windows XP users will prevent the tech community from moving forward for quite some time. And afaik even Win7 32-bit still can't boot from GPT drives.

 

Ya, that's going to be an interesting transition. Also very difficult to explain for layman purchases...