Vista RTM on Thinkpad T40
I have been running Vista Ultimate RTM on my aging Thinkpad T40 and its running reasonably well, although it’s my third machine (After my Desktop and Tablet) so I am not a demanding user. I had to do a bare metal install though as I didn’t have enough disk space for an upgrade.
The main issue I had was lack of power management which was caused by the lack of a driver for the ATI embedded graphics chip set. The correct driver was delivered automatically by Windows update for Vista RC1 but was nowhere to be seen in RTM.
To fix this:
- Go here http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-41918 and download and unpack the driver
- Go to control panel and pick “update device drivers”
- Open up display adapters in the list and pick your card, right click and select properties
- Pick the driver tab, select update drivers and then select browse by computer for driver software
- Browse to c:\drivers
- make sure you check the subfolders check box
This should install the XP driver, which seems to work for me, although I don’t play games, but importantly you can now suspend your Thinkpad!
Steve-
Many thanks for this blogpost. I went through more than one install on my T40 and tried a number of different drivers with varying and unsuccessful results. Now I have power management and decent screen savers working.
Great post! I would like to install Vista on my ThinkPad T40, and I would like to do a clean install, but I can’t figure out how to format the laptop. Can you help?