Thinkpad X60 Tablet running Vista

My second hand Thinkpad X60 tablet arrived today via HireIT and eBay.  Its an ex eval model and in perfect condition even though it was less than half price.  Even better HireIt seem to give you whatever model they have available and in my case the spec was up-rated quite a bit from the model they were selling on eBay.

So that’s the good bit,  the not so bad bits were:

1. I got the Tablet and the power supply, no manuals, disks etc.  No loss really
2. They had installed their standard image onto the machine,  not too bad an image as they go, but unbelievably on a TABLET they had installed XP Pro!!

For the average user this would be a bit if a issue, but not for me as I was going to blow the image away anyway and install Vista.  This is what I did to get a completely clean Vista install:

1. First off I wanted to delete the IBM hidden system restore partition as I don’t need this backup capability.
2. To do this you need to go into the BIOS by pressing F1 during boot and pick security,  and then PreDesktop and then select disabled.  The partition will then be visible to Vista
3. Boot from the Vista DVD by pressing F12 during boot, initially go into repair operating system, and open up a command prompt
4. At the command prompt run diskpart – you will use this to delete the partition (5GB)
5. The following instructions DELETE ALL YOUR PARTITIONS, i.e destroy all data on your disk!!!
6. I don’t remember the exact DISKPART command but it goes something like this.  Type SELECT DISK 0, LIST PARTITION, SELECT PARTITION 1, DELETE PARTITION OVERRIDE.  do this for every partion on the disk. 
7. Reboot and hit F12, this time install Vista rather than repair.  You will only be presented with the option to do a customized install because you have deleted the old partitions
8. Install Vista
9. In my case at the end of the install both wireless and wired networks were working fine so I left Vista alone for an hour to download and install all the updates
10. I then installed an Anti-virus product, in my case the free and excellent AVG Free
11. The I installed the excellent Thinkvantage system update utility and installed everything except the rescue and recovery tool (this is the backup product that I didn’t want to use)
12. This downloads and installs most of the drivers, help files etc that you need, but strangely a few are missing.
13. You also need to install the Active Protection System, this is needed it you want the auto-rotate function to work
14. And you want the Shortcut menu
15. Once you have installed the shortcut menu press the key associated with it – between screen rotate and escape, and pick settings (lower left) and enable ActiveRotate
16. That’s all I’ve noticed so far