Windows 7: 7077 on an old IBM Thinkpad

I wasn't sure if it would actually work, but I installed 7077 on my friend's old IBM Thinkpad. He received it from a friend for free, running XP with a ton of unneeded programs bogging it down. It took about six minutes to fully start up. After putting 7 on there, it dropped to about 25 seconds. Most of the drivers weren't in the install, but after connecting it to the Internet through Ethernet, Windows Update found six 'updates' in about half a second...all of them being the missing drivers.



It's not near as fast as 7 could be, but it's running a hell of a lot faster than it was before. It also scored a much higher WEI than I thought it would (graphics aside).

You didn't state the Thinkpad model...is it a T43??

I have Windows 7 running on my T43 and it's not bad at all. It seems to have the same CPU specs as you have in your Pics but I have 1.5GB of memory. It's pretty cheap to upgrade memory. My T43 seems faster than any Atom netbook I have played with.

I can't wait to vLite (or better yet, 7Lite) the final Windows 7 version to reduce the unneeded parts of the OS to help make this old laptop a valuable piece of gear for snappy surfing and email.

You allready can disable a ****load of windows related stuff like mediacenter/player/ie/search/.net.
Imho vlite is obsolete now the rest part of tweaking stuff like remember more folder view e.g can also be done in a running os..

It could be a T43, I'm not quite sure as I didn't have much time with it. I'll check that when I see him on Monday.

I'm running 7 on a thinkpad t43 (see specs) and I have to report that it is excellent. Performance is about equal to XP, massively better than I expected. I can't say it's faster, but it's not any slower than the well maintained XP installation it's replaced. As reported by Azural, windows update supplied all of the drivers. Everything works, including the fingerprint reader (using windows supplied software) and bluetooth. The only drawback is that mine has the intel gma 915 graphics, so no aero. I don't know if the Ati X300 adapters work with aero.

Specs on these things are about that of a netbook, but I think performance is quite a bit better. For what these things go for I think they are an excellent deal, especially since they run 7 just fine. Most are off corporate lease, in good shape, and about $300. Built like tanks, yet lightweight.