Yesterday, someone asked me if I had a chance to install Windows 7 on my Lenovo W500 notebook computer. Well, I said yet, three times.
It started when Windows 7 Beta came out. My Vista had gotten sufficiently slow that I decided I needed to reinstall something. Being the adventurous type, I decided to give it a go, but with a “goback” plan. My go back plan was to install al the programs on drive C in my 2nd hard drive (in the media bay), then put all my personal data on my built in hard drive. That way, I could easily switch back to vista by simply popping out the removable drive and putting in my vista boot drive.
I never actually did go back to vista, but there were times I did waste a lot of time when I probably should have. Beta was pretty frustrating. Drivers were not so good, some crashing, some hanging, but not surprising. RC was actually fatal. My computer completely stopped booting when it was not docked. Luckily RTM had just arrived so I repaved. Sadly now, with RTM, I’m starting to have the same booting problem. It gets past the first windows logo, then boots (but you’d never know it). If docked, no problem. I’m on an airplane now and my docking station is far far away.
The last thing I did was change my bios display config to “no OS detection on graphics card” and “Discrete mode” and it did boot this time. No science on this because sometimes it would just work anyhow.
Anyone has more data on this, let me know. Could be my notebook is hosed. Who knows. For now I’m up and not going to shutdown until the pry the keyboard from my laptop tray.
(I’m also not completely sure it’s not a hardware problem)
August 19th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Have you tried the beta Windows 7 drivers on the Lenovo site? http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=WIN7-BETA
September 3rd, 2009 at 7:19 am
I had better luck with my w500, with one vexing problem that finally got fixed and only one problem still remaining.
The most difficulty was getting the fingerprint reader working. Software from Lenovo never did work right – the fingerprint enrollment program refused to talk to the device no matter what I tried.
However, there is Authentec software on their site that is not specific to the Lenovo, and it worked fine. I just wish it had not taken three hours of time to get to that point.
My last remaining issue is that the ATI video driver apparently does not know how to use the entire laptop screen when going to lower resolutions. That is, in Vista, I usually ran 1440 x 900, just to get reasonable size on the text and icons, and to make the physical dpi match my external 20″ monitor. In Win7, changing to a lower resolution makes the screen restricted to an appropriately sized section, centered in the available area with the rest of the laptop screen just being black. So the physical dpi doesn’t change.
This is going to be a real issue when I do presentations for projectors that only handle 1024 x 768. That results in a screen image on the laptop that is about 8 3/4 inches diagonal.
My old eyes are not going to like that. I hope this issue is fixed before fall conference season.
September 3rd, 2009 at 7:24 am
I’ve done presentations at 1024 and 1280 with no problems. I have the 1920 version. did you try the native win7 drivers lenovo has? I’m still using what is part of windows 7 because I have not had major problems. I’m also hesitant to register my finger prints because I don’t want them stolen. I’m not confident of the security issues yet.
HTH’s.
-Peter
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:39 pm
I went to the page for Win7 beta drivers at Lenovo, but I didn’t see ATI drivers, only nVidia. So I’m using the driver Win7 installed automatically (actually it was installed on the first Windows Update run after installation).
January 7th, 2010 at 8:58 am
I have dual booted my w500 with win 7 and Fedora 12.
Have 2 problems and not sure why they show up in windows 7 but not in Linux.
1st one is sometimes if a login to fast the system freezes. Only way back in it if I do a hard reboot. Thought it was the virus scanner but it happens even if it’s not present.
2nd one is the 2nd HDD. I invested in the 2nd HDD bay and at boot works just fine but even when using it sometimes it disapears for no reason. I checked the power settings and turn HD off is disabled. In linux I don’t have this issue at all.
Any help would be appreciated
January 20th, 2010 at 7:14 am
I’ve got Windows 7 Professional running on a W500, install went smoothly, looks great and very quick, however there is a problem with the stbility of the graphics drivers.
The driver included with Windows has issues redrawing the screen it seems after a few minutes and the driver from Windows update actually crashes the machine.
Could anyone please list the drivers that they are using for their ATI card if they’re not having problems pls?
PS a link would be fantastic!