windows 7 clean install

Hi, i just got windows seven upgrade from my school and i am going to use it on my t400 and was wondering if i have to find the drivers myself or will windows update find them for me. BTW, this a clean install. Thanks in advance

 

Windows will update Win7 and other Microsoft products. You also need to get new Win7-specific drivers for your T400 from the Lenovo site.

 

Grab yourself some network drivers (LAN or Wireless) and get System Update 4.0. It will install all Lenovo drivers/tools automatically.

If you prefer to install the drivers manually, you can follow Arkis Guide for Vista.

 

You can also check out my Windows 7 clean install micro guide

 

I wouldn't trust the lenovo update service to do the gpu drivers right. Best to manually do them.

 

I also have a T400 and Win7 offered by the school. Is x64 bit as smooth an install processes with lenovo drivers as x32?

 

Install processes with Lenovo drivers for 64bit just the same as for 32bit.

(though on my W500 I had even more problems with the Lenovo gpu drivers for 64bit than for 32bit, and retreated to 32bit. still problems with Lenovo-provided Win7 Intel gpu driver (runs too hot), but better than for 64bit).

With 4GB+ ram, Win7 64bit is much much faster than 32bit. Amazing difference! Wish Lenovo would fix their Win7 gpu drivers. (maybe not a problem for T400?)

 

The thing I don't get is that the backup partition and the rescue recovery partition are still there even when win7 installed. I thought it would wipe out the hard drive completely.

The school just gave me a key and the .iso file and i had to make the install disk myself
And yeah, im missing a lot of drivers, none of the Fn functions work.

 

@airmax951
As suggested higher you can save yourself a lot of headache by installing the system update utility. It will figure out what you need.
On a clean install Windows 7 it downloaded and successfully installed all the right drivers and all the Fn functions (except Fn+F9, which is the easyeject utility and is no longer available) work great.

@antskip
System update actually did an excellent job for me with installing the gpu drivers.

 

Something to keep in mind that I had the "opportunity" to relive (since I haven't installed an OS for quite some time ...)

- make sure you get your network/lan drivers ready (on a flash memory key or whatever) because when I did a clean install my wireless network drivers were not installed. I had to manually direct the network card to detect the drivers to install them
- once wifi and internet was up and running I installed system update 4.0 which worked great as far as I can tell ... downloaded pretty much everything I needed.
- if you're going to partition your hdd to OS and a data partition ... make sure you have enough room for the OS, like 25-30gb perhaps. If you don't give yourself room you'll put yourself into a position of learning some fancy 3rd party partition trickery (gparted anyone?) since it seems impossible to extend an OS partition natively, although you can shrink it.
- good luck.

 

I ran system update 4.0 and it ran smoothly. I was just wondering, does system update install the thinkvantage utilities? And if it doesn't where do I go and get them.
Do the on-screen notification for caps lock and num lock still work? Because they do not seem to appear anymore.

 

These don't show up on mine running Windows 7.

 

I just did a clean install of Win7 using the Lenovo upgrade disk and it seemed to find the drivers for both my intel wifi card and the ATI graphics card during the windows installation, even before I ran system update. I've no idea if system update then updated the ATI stuff, but it did install a more recent set of intel drivers and it all went extremely smoothly -- more smoothly than I'm used to with both windows and Lenovo!

The Thinkvantage utilities have to be downloaded separately I think -- I installed the toolbox from the accompanying Lenovo software disk. I've never had on-screen display for cap lock or num lock so no idea what those are. Onscreen display works for everything else.

 

system update should install the thinkvantage suite as well