Vista or XP?

I just got myself a new T61. I'm wondering if a Vista clean install would be a better idea or winxp?
I'd love to get winxp on this since it's faster and more compatible and I don't mind losing the turbo memory but there seems to be other problems like the graphics card etc causing probs in xp?

Thanks~

 

turbo memory does nothing significant.
stick with XP.
i dont know of any xp issues with a T61.

 

would my recovery partition by affected by me installing xp? Like if one day I decide to revert everything back to factory settings, would that still be possible after installing xp or will xp wipe out all of that data?
And thinkadvantage should work fine right? I'm referring to that thinkadvantage recovery thing that loads up before the OS if you press that blue button. It seems to be running under vista.

 

I'd get Vista. I've had it for about 5 months now and never had any compatibility issues. Also I never had to re-install the OS and it still performs great even though my laptop isn't the fastest.

 

Do you own a thinkpad?

 

I don't know if this applies to Thinkpad's or not, but I have heard of problems with installing XP on a laptop that already has the Turbo Memory installed. Just wanted to throw that out there.

 

In my experience Vista is slower than XP. That's not a scientific measure just my own observations. Vista has run fine on my R60. It looks better in my opinion. Whatever you do, burn the recovery discs off and save a copy of the SWTools folder.

 

I would get vista just because it is the new thing on the block and although many people claim that it is very buggy, I have a minimal amount of problems. XP is definitely a much more stable OS, BSOD's with XP pro is almost non-existent.

 

I would stick with vista all the driver issues seem to be fixed

 

I'm not really having any issues with vista, so I like it so far. I don't really game though and well, my t61 is pretty fast and has 2GB of ram, so it does what it needs to for me.

 

Use XP for now; I went from Vista back to XP to get my work apps running.

I will move to 64bit Vista once things are stabilized and my work applications run on it.


Edit: My T61p runs awesome on a clean XP install, but was pretty slow on Vista with bloatware.

 

By all means order Vista.....especially if you want a machine that is much slower, a memory hog and has much less battery life. A great way to get 1GB performance (so long as you buy 2GB).

However if you value speed and battery life and reliability you might order XP.

The main reason I ordered a Lenovo was because it would ship with XP.

Perry

 

Vista has a lot of bugs right now. XP is more stable. When I first installed Vista on my desktop, it felt like a really dodgy, alpha or beta version of Linux. I had Vista on my T61, but decided to install Windows XP instead for the meantime. Once Vista has stablized and is better, I may switch back to Vista. If I want to use other OS or applications, I will run a virtual machine in VMWare.

 

an update:
after disabling a lot of the useless services in vista, (went from 124 processes to 57), including the indexing service, and updating the system, I'm finding vista to work pretty good...for now. Nothing bad has gone wrong...so far. It IS a bit slow in booting up though but I've been able to make it shutdown a whole lot faster. Hibernation isn't that fast either which sort of defeats the purpose of the feature.
I know XP SP2 loads up realllyyyy fast on this type of machine so if I get pissed off with the 1minute 15s boot time I'm getting now with vista, I might just attempt the xp sp2 install...which is not supposed to be that easy to do on the t61. Let's see how it works out.

 

I had Vista installed initially (b/c i wanted to use turbo memory). I think it was pretty quick but my explorer bar would disappear and need to be restarted (just the bar) too often. I also got a complete system freeze a few times. I switched to XP and now that I have all the drivers, etc. up, it is quite stable. I even put a vista skin on it (ha ha) and added a few XP Powertoys that let me alt-tab preview, etc. I'm waiting for vista sp1. I think apps loaded a bit quicker on vista (? turbo memory). XP is quite fast. I was running vista with all the gimmicks disabled. The only thing about vista I missed initially was the ease of setting up networking. I also liked the way it handled folders better (not My this My that). But for my use XP is more than enough.

 

I'm running Vista and would suggest you go with XP.

Vista runs reasonably well but if you use Microsoft Office a lot and have old files that you're bringing over from older versions of the program, it is very glitchy.

 

Is this a popularity contest or a discussion of functionality?

I'm facing the same question as well, and from what I've read so far it seems like XP makes more sense for a notebook right now, as long as the 4GB memory limit isn't an issue. Based on the posts I have read on booting speed, hardware demands, and resource use it seems like the obvious choice for mobile use. Unless the extra processor cycles and memory required yield real dividends in saving power elsewhere, or some key Vista functionality is required in a particular application, it seems like the new OS is just more wasteful.

(Note: I do not have any Vista experience, but am formulating the above as a possible counter-argument based on information found on this site and elsewhere. Please feel free to point out where I'm wrong!)

 

I went with xp pro but also ordered turbo memory so that I have it if and when I switch to Vista.

 

another update: I just recently installed winxp pro and whoa, this laptop flies now. With vista it was really slow even after a clean install (maybe I didn't do it right) but with xp everything works as expected and I feel that I have new technology.
Vista did do something weird w/ my TPM though...and I'm told I have to go to an authorized reseller to have it reprogrammed...*sigh*

 

I may join you in the Vista-to-XP club.