Upgrading to Vista Business -Any hints/tips?

I recently received my Vista Business Upgrade for my T60. I was was wondering if anyone had any hint/tips to make the upgrade go smoothly. I have already backed up all of my data to an external hard drive. I am going to do a clean install, so I have also donwloaded all of the device drivers and am going to burn them to a CD. I read somewhere that I can't just do a clean install stright from the Vista disc, I need to install XP and then upgrade from it. Am I correct or is there a way that I can do a truly clean install? I've also upgraded the BIOS and the Bluetooth Firmware, the CD Firmware, and the Hard Drive firmware.

Apart from what I have done, has anyone encountered any problems with installing Vista?

 

I'm happy to say that Vista Enterprise is running great on my 14.1" T60.

 

I just recently installed vista business on my t60. I did a clean install using the upgrade disc (this was recommended by many, apparently a straight upgrade can cause many problems). To do a clean install, all I had to do was not enter the serial number during the install (can be done anytime afterwards within 30 days), then click on "custom" instead of "upgrade" when given the choice.

Upgrade went smoothly, except for one minor problem. Vista did not immediately recognize my wireless, thingpad a/b/g/n. I had to download it (I kept XP in another partition, dual-boot) on XP and then install it on vista. After that, I was able to download Thinkvantage Update, and it automatically downloaded and installed all necessary drivers and upgrade. So you do not need to put all the drivers on a CD. Now everything is running smoothly.

 

I would note you can enter the serial and not activate it and boot form the CD to do a clean install... This is what I did. I intend to use it for at least 60 days before activating it. This is possible via the command line reset options. If nothing serious is wrong after 60 days I will just activate it rather than revert to WinXP. So far nothing serious bad.

One good thing too, it finds network devices (such as wireless printers) that XP didn't ever do much of a job on. No stability issues, though there are some bugs in the Lenovo power manger if you use it. The bigger icons make my desktop feel less spacious but its easier to read I guess. Over all I think Vista doesn't have much of a learning curve and is better than XP. UAC is annoying, but I'm glad it is there, there pretty much is no way to do a silent install to any system protected area now (assuming there is no hole in UAC itself).

 

Did you guys just blow away the recovery partition and claim the space, or did you leave that in tact?

 

I left it it's only 4 GB.

 

I got rid of it. I would rather have the extra space because I still have 40gb on the XP partition.

 

I blew it away.

 

I'm still kinda confused about what the system uses the recovery partition for. I know that it has the operating system files on it so that I can restore XP to the factory state. But what else does it do. Do any programs from windows, besides Rescue & Recovery, access it? Is it possible to remap the Thinkvantage button to perhaps make it a shortcut to open something from within windows?

 

What type of device drivers do we need for Vista?

and, what do you mean by updating the hard drive firmware?

 

We need vista comatible drivers. None of the XP ones will work. Every device has a firmware that controls its innermost workings. On the motherboard, this is the BIOS. The hard drive and cd/dvd drive happened to have firmware updates available, so I just downloaded a disk image, burned it to an RW and then booted to it. I'm not sure how much updated firmware will do for cd drives and hard drives, but I know that the bluetooth needed a firmware update to make it compatible with vista.