Upgrade time for my X60 Tablet PC

Yesterday, two 1gb memory chips and a Hitachi 100gb 7200 rpm drive that I had ordered arrived, so I spent a couple of hours doing those upgrades.

The memory upgrade was very simple: remove the memory plate from the back of the tablet, remove the old chips, plug in the new ones and reboot. 

The harddrive upgrade was a tad more complicated, but still without issue:

1. I used Acronis True Image to image my system to a Maxtor USB drive.
2. After the image was complete, I unscrewed the harddrive plate from the side of the tablet, removed the drive, removed the rubber protectors, and removed the drive from the caddy.
3. I then screwed the caddy to the new 7200rpm drive, attached the rubber protectors, slid the drive back in and attached the cover.
4. I plugged in my USB drive and my USB cd rom that contain an Acronis boot program, and followed the Acronis recovery wizard that then took the image from the USB drive and applied it to my new drive
5. The reimage took about 30 minutes, and I booted up to a much faster X60 Tablet PC!

My recommendation to the casual user is to put your new drive in and boot to the recovery disks. With Vista around the corner, I’d hold off on a harddrive upgrade until the OEM cds arrive.

I then proceeded to upgrade to Vista Ultimate Edition. To be honest, I’ve been going back and forth about upgrading to Vista until the official drivers and upgrade CD was released by Lenovo. However, I had a good image from my XP system, so I decided to see what the upgrade path was like and learn some lessons for the sake of team.

The ugprade compatability reported a lot of compatability issues with Lenovo preinstalled apps, but momentum was pushing me forward! Several hours later, much to my surprise, I booted up to a near perfect functional X60 Tablet PC running Vista, complete with tablet buttons, rotation, navigation buttons, and waking the tablet up from sleep by removing the pen. In addition, I do not have any unrecognized devices in Device Manager. I’ve also got Vista Aero running with Transparency and 3d Flip.  However, the fingerprint enrollment software doesn’t work, and the Thinkpad Productivity button is now remapped to the Tablet PC settings dialog box.

I am having various issues with Lenovo preinstalled software like Client Security Solutions, Productivity Center, the ThinkVantage button, etc – they just won’t run. No concern there for me at all. I can accomplish most everything I need through Vista applets, and actually prefer it that way.

Now, this is where it gets kind of messy. I decided to begin removing applications and utilities I wouldn’t need in Vista, like the Zune theme, Tablet Education Pack, various Tablet PC Entertainment pack programs, Lenovo fingerprint software, Client Security Solutions, Snipping Tool 2.0, etc. Upon trying to uninstall these applications, I started getting errors telling me that XP SP2 Tablet Edition is required to install to dll and directory path errors for the Lenovo software, etc.  Bottomline: I can’t uninstall a lot of software or built-in utilities because of OS requirements the uninstall routine has. Why does an uninstall routine have an OS requirement? All I want to do is get rid of it.

So, here are my recommendations on upgrading to Vista after doing this with both a Lenovo X60 Tablet PC and a Fujitsu P1610 Tablet PC:

Do a clean install ( ie – don’t take the ugprade route ), but wait until the official drivers and upgrade CD is released from your OEM. There are too many issues with uninstalling old software that leaves too many things hanging around. My feeling is that when the new OS is released, it is best to start with a clean slate. If you are of the adventurous type and like living on the edge, go for the upgrade now, but be prepared to do a lot of manual clean up work.

For right now, I’m leaving my system as is with Vista – it is completely functional, fast, and stable. I’m not missing any of the functionality of the Lenovo apps that won’t run, but I sure would like to get rid of them! Once Lenovo releases the official drivers and CD, I’ll be installing a fresh image on my X60.