W520 - Has anyone done a fresh install of Win7 and with no Lenovo Software ?

Let me clarify,

I am looking for the results, issues, lack of issues, other experiences from people who have a W520 and did a fresh clean install of Win 7, no not from a cloned image, or backup discs, lenovo restore etc., but from a Win 7 disc.

And, did not install any of the extras from Lenovo. Like Power manager jazz etc.
Just basic stock drivers needed, or mostly went with the drivers in Win7.

And I am very curious how things went after. Ya know, issues, or not. What had to be tweaked, fixed, whatever.

Thanks

 

Don't have a W520 myself, but I guess any of the "clean install" guides for the _20 models will work. When I clean installed my T420s, I only used a Win 7 SP1 disk and the Intel Wireless drivers on a USB stick. After installing the base Win 7, I installed the wireless drivers from the USB, connected to my network and just grabbed everything Windows Update detected. After a few reboot and Windows Update scan cycles, I opened my Windows Device Manager and used Google to find out what the remaining Unknown devices were. Downloaded those drivers a la carte from lenovo.com and installed them manually. They were things like smartcard driver, Intel AMT driver, Ricoh memory card reader, etc. Do not currently have any ThinkVantage applications installed and things are working fine.

 

jashsu- thanks for your reply, good info, especially the bit that things are working fine. I dare say that the W520 and T420s are two different machines though. Different mobo's, hardware etc. But thanks again.

And

Let me be clear as CRYSTAL for others

I don't need help or advice how to do an install, at all !

If you want to tell me how you did it fine, that is ok.

..........

I need input from people who have done this on a W520

as I described

and

how did the machine run after doing so

no offense but I am only looking for results after the aforementioned was done

and sure, please go into detail as to what did or did not work

*sigh

 

You can certainly do the install you are looking for information on. My install is close.

The Lenovo software I install is Power Manager, Hotkey, On screen display support, and the Ultranav utility. But that's about it.

 

I tried it back in May and Loaded 7 ultimate. I remember not liking it as well but i don't recall all the details. I know it booted slower and there were a couple of other things that I didn't like. Went back to my image of winpro and have been satisfied. I also remember having a little blip during the install but I found where someone else had the same problem and they had solved it so I installed it the same way they did. I was installing on a vertex 3 and I can't remember if that had anything to do with it or not. There doesn't seem to be much bloatware on here. I like lenovo's power manager better than windows and anything i didn't want to use i didn't install. Here's my pcvantage score with this setup and an intel 510 loaded with lenovo's recovery disks, or actually an image of them. This was last friday, I had a higher score in August.
NVIDIA Quadro 2000M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,LENOVO 4270CTO score: 19076 PCMarks

I don't think lenovo's build is slowing it down much!

 

wow, wish I could afford your processor

 

i've tweaked it a bit i've had really good luck using ramdisk. i have a 3gb ramdisk and have my temp files and virtual memory on that. i know it sounds nuts putting the virtual memory on ram but it performs better that way so that's how i'm running it. the processor is great but probably not worth the extra unless you keep the laptop for a long time. i usually use mine for 4 years and then pass it on to someone else in the office.

 

isn't that to save the read and writes to the ssd ?

I am still reading up on tweaking settings for optimum ssd performance and lifespan

 

yeah it is. i have 250mg of virtual memory on that drive and none on the others. i also set it up without hibernation and without the recycle bin. the hiberfil.sys file was around 16gb i think. i did most of the ssd tweaks but left indexing and superfetch on. i'm just using superfetch for boot files though.

 

very good info man

and yeah, I had heard about deleting hiberfil and leaving superfetch on
wasn't sure about turning off indexing though, I read opinions that said
do and do not, although I always turn it off in Win7 'remove windows
features/programs' but leave it ticked as on in the properties window of the c-drive

of course you turned off defrag right !!!???

lol

and how did you tweak superfetch to only use bootfiles btw ?

thanks

and have a rep+

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters put in 2 for boot files only. my memory is fading lol. i switched it to boot only and then switched back to 3 because it seems to work better that way.prefetcher is set to 2. defrag is off!
thanks

 

sweet

 

Installed an SSD and typically dont like installing OEM software like power management. So far things seem fine, but I had to disable CPU power management in the bios. I have no idea why, but with it enabled performance seemed inconsistent and would "lag" doing simple things. Disable it and everything is great. Battery life is fine and computer is working great. Boots very fast with my OWC drive (similar to Vertex 2, got last year). I havent really tested anything 3d yet..

 

Thank you, that's pretty much going to be me. I never use oem proggys unless absolutely neccessary, and have an old habit of keeping my running processes slim, not to mention power managers (like Dells) are worst trouble than benefit.

I did see quite a few in the lenovo camp though that seem to like and prefer using the one with the w520. Guess I needed to hear from someone who didn't have it installed say things are fine and dandy. Hence the thread.

Thanks again.

 

I sort of like all the power options and interface lenovo's power manager gives you. I installed clean win7 ultimate and used the oem driver/software tool and then windows update. I left off most everything else....my blue button doesn't bring up menus anymore. Then I used the SSD tweaker tool to toggle which optimizations I wanted on. I've done it manually before but this was much easier seeing everything on one window

 

thanks, that's great input