T400: Advantages of Clean Install & Partitions

My new t400 should be coming soon (very excited) and I'm wondering how necessary do you guys think a clean install it (I'm getting Vista Business x64 btw)? Is there really that much bloatware to compromise the speed of the notebook? Or can I just uninstall what I don't need

Also did u guys leave your harddrive partition or did you just burn it on a disk and delete it? What's the advantages/disadvantages?

 

I would suggest that you try it with the installed image that comes from Lenovo...first thing I did was burned the restore discs. After this, the program that burns the discs also gives you the option to delete the partition so you can regain one back.

Then go through Add/Remove programs and remove the stuff that you don't want or need.

Then see how it runs.

I personally wiped after doing this and did a clean install only installing required drivers, the GPS lenovo app, and the Lenovo hotkey program. The lenovo programs seemed to glitch on me a few times and it just annoyed me...everyone's experience is different though and you will get 300 different suggestions...which is why I just suggest you try it first and see how it goes.

I did not see any major performance differences between the stock image and a clean install.

 

keep it stock....unless you want to go through the headache of a "clean" install....people who do clean install are either expecting to keep their computer "clean" the rest of its life or just like messing with their hardware.

Trust me, you are better off removing unwanted programs, unwanted startup items, and doing a de-fragment to tweak your performance.

 

You are much better off just staying with the stock install and installing what you don't want (bloatware.)

I"ve done both clean install and stock with a T400. There is no performance difference. The clean install is a waste of time. (unless you really, really, really need that extra 10GB, or you want to install a different OS.)

The bloatware is minimal; most of it are icons that point to a folder (ready to install, but not installed.)

 

My advice is stick with a clean install l; maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but my thought is if you have to ask the question you're more likely to cause yourself headaches than you'll see any real benefit. My T400 was relatively free of bloatware apart from the ThinkVantage utilities. Add/remove programs and a good registry cleaner and you can clean it up pretty quickly.

I strongly recommend the VERY FIRST thing you do is use a third-party backup package like Acronis or Norton or whatever to make an image of your fresh disk. Takes something like 16-17GB and is quickly done to an external hard disk.

Do this BEFORE making the Factory Restore Media since that process can only be done once and if it hiccups you might be stuck having to order discs from Lenovo.

 

My recommendations:
1. Burn the recovery media right away
2. Remove unwanted software

In my case I did step 1 and then proceeded to completely wipe the entire hard disk. Reason: I want all the juice of HDD as possible and having 1Gig of RAM was making Vista sluggish as hell.
Did a clean install of XP SP3 on my 80GB HDD (that's why I went the 'clean' route).
Maybe in the future I will reload my recovery media DVD's with RAM upgraded to at least 2 GIGS.

Right now my HDD space is almost filled up, I tend to download lots of software and movies, but in your case it may differ.

 

I did a clean install and I'm happy with it. Yeah, it does take some time, but it so much relieving to see minimal number of programs loading at startup everytime.

Performance difference, not very much. Lenovo 'bloatware' is very minimal. I hated McCafe pre-installed.
Regrets with Clean Install : NO

Oh, BTW .. I didnt stop with clean install. I reformatted and re partitioned the whole system. I'm planning to install ubuntu soon, so I had to get another primary partition. Lenovo comes with 3 Primary and its difficult to resize x64 native partitioner (vista partitioner) .. and third party softwares for x64 is not good.

In short. Do a clean install, but it wont make much of a difference, but its always good to do that .. do it esp if you wanna partition is *your* way.

 

Don't bother with a clean install.

Here's what i did:
-uninstall programs you don't need(i ditched a few thinkvantage ones).
-remove all non essential startup programs
-Follow the vista tweak guide in the os section of the forums (ie. disable uac, system restore ect..)
-disable the superfetch service (biggest improvement for me)
-defrag the system
-create a backup DVD of the system.
-thinkvatage update
-windows update
-defrag

That easily cut my boot time in 1/2.

 

my advice-

very FIRST thing you should do, whether you do a clean install or not, is image the hard drive.

why? it takes 5-10 minutes to reinstall an acronis image. it will take upwards of an hour or more (in my experience) to reinstall with the restoration disks...

this way, no matter WHAT you do, you will have the image to go back to if you need to.

also- i have had the best luck using acronis to restore the entire hard drive booting from a USB drive. i highly suggest making a bootable rescue USB drive!!! when i would try to restore the hard drive from a normal hard drive boot (windows), it would ask to restart and just hang. yikes.

personally, i did a clean install. i prefer to know what is running and so on. if you are not a "power user" i would not suggest messing with it. there is not a huge performance gain, and it takes a long time.

but some people just gotta mess with their computer, myself included

i repeat- even if you don't do a clean install- image that hard drive! i think vista business can do this out of the box. that way when you are messing around with the programs and you screw something up (it happens to all of us), you will be able to get back to a working setup.

 

Well I figure once you make recovery disks, why keep the image on the harddrive (which takes up valuable space). I mean it's rare for you to wanna recover back to stock? Any other little mistake you could just use system restore couldn't you?

I guess my question is, should I leave the partition on the harddrive or just delete? (after making recovery disks obviously)

Can anyone point me to the direction of the whole recovery disks/partition guide or maybe a t400 setup guide if it exists? Thanks!

 

Yeah. I'm looking for the whole thing as well.

Should we just stick to the back up using thinkvantage or do a image of the whold harddisk?

And what about re-partition? Has anybody done that yet? Which software did you use and how to stay away from that 5 giagbytes hidden hd?

Thanks a lot. I've done my search, but couldn't find the answer.

 

I thought Lenovo has software to make the backup image doesn't it? Is there any advantage to using 3rd party?

 

I used ThinkVantage. It took about 10G. Is there anything superior of Acronis or Norton?

 

The first thing I also did were the images that Lenovo suggests at some point, you never know when you'll need them. I however find a fresh install easier, it's less of a headache.

That way, I know exactly what's installed and configured and if ever Windows starts bugging down and cause problems, I'll have a better idea at what causes it and save time then.

 

I didn't have time to read everyone's reply in this thread but here's my 2 cents:

Clean installs are what I like to call "gateway skills". It's very addicting, especially if you do it on a older computer that's been bogged down over time. The "clean" feeling you get is unlike any other high. However, it can't stop there! Once you've built tolerance to clean installs, you have to get another fix...enhanced clean installs.

Yes. I'm talking about shaving seconds off your boot time, removing un-needed services, deleting parts of XP or Vista that nobody ever uses. You are now on the path to becoming truly, L33t.


Do what you want. Just remember that you've been w4rn3d.

OMFG LOL BBQ*


* I have no idea what the pwnt language adds to this post, but it was fun!

 

Whatever happened to the custom factory restore. It doesn't exist in the T400 with Vista. In the T61, there was the BSA software that let you select which of the bloatware was installed. This way you could do a clean install using lenovo's installation.