Windows 7 availability and other question

I've signed up for the "free" upgrade and my credit card was charged about 4 days ago. anyone know anything about the shipping date of those?
Also, I've noticed on the Lenovo website that some of the newer Thinkpads have this "Enhanced" Win 7 feature that makes windows 7 more compatible for better performance.

Is that hardware tweaking on the new systems to make them work better with win 7 or simply a software (registry/driver tweaks), is that something that would also be available to me with my installation of Win7, once I get the CD from Lenovo?

 

There was a lot of information released regarding The Lenovo Windows 7 Enhanced Experience (EE) on Lenovo blogs and forums.

Lenovo Blogs
Lenovo Forums

To summarize it:

What they did was tweak the BIOS, tweak the drivers and tweak the operating system itself (services, driver load order, etc). There should not be any hardware tweaks.

You can get the tweaked BIOS and the tweaked drivers, but you cannot get the entire EE. You can read the forums and blogs above to get a detailed explanation (if you are interested). Basically the entire experience is available if you use the Lenovo system image, which contains some of the tweaks. But the image is only available to those who purchased a Lenovo AFTER general availability of Windows 7 (after 22nd October).

 

Yes, lots of good info over there at Lenovo forum. There's a long, active thread under the Windows 7 release event forum, where the unfortunate lenovo reps are taking a lot of heat for delivery of the Win 7 upgrade, or lack thereof. While I think the anger is misdirected at the folks who participate on the forum and help people out, I do concur that Lenovo could've done a better job on getting the upgrade to people in a timely manner.

In my case, I received an X200 tablet on 22 Oct - it shipped with Vista. I ordered it with Vista because I expected a backlog and higher prices after Win 7 became available, so I jumped on a good price on the Vista machine and figured I'd do the "free" Win 7 upgrade. Well, first, the cost of freedom was $17.03. Not a deal breaker but rather annoying. If I am going to pay Lenovo an extra $17.03 for the cost to burn and ship a couple CDs then there must be a fair amount of fat in their upgrade administration budget, right? Well, that didn't translate into timely delivery of the goods or even in good communication because even though my card was charged four days ago, my order status remains "pending fulfillment." Come on, Lenovo, it's just not good practice to charge someone's card until a product ships, especially when you tell customers you won't do that.

Meanwhile, I've come to appreciate what a steaming pile of crap Vista is - my 5-year-old Dell klunker boots into XP in less than 30 seconds while my brand new Lenovo tablet with ultra-fast SSD takes over a minute to get into Vista. Therefore, I'm really not going to bother loading all my apps and data into Vista just to repeat the process when I do a clean install of Windows 7. So, effectively, I have an brand-new tablet that's sitting idle on my desk waiting for my Win 7 upgrade while I type this message out on my old Dell klunker. I'm not necessarily angry about this, just disappointed. I really love the tablet, I'm just anxious to start using it as intended.

 

At least in the case of Vista, it was not the actual manufacturer that handled the upgrade media rather a third party. I don't want to defend anyone (after all, late is late) but it might not be Lenovo who is directly responsible for not posting your Windows 7 media.

 

wow, people are really not too pleased about the availability of their Win 7 upgrade over at the Lenovo forums...