I have had my current laptop (company issued) for nearly 2 years now. In technology years, that’s more like 8 years. However, I still think my laptop’s hardware specs can kick butt. So why is it that it takes me nearly 5 min to boot up to Vista? Could Windows 7 solve my woes? Perhaps…
To be fair, since Vista SP1 was released most of my headaches with the hardware went away (in particular, the bug with the sleep/hibernate feature). What is taking my laptop 5 minutes to boot up? What is Vista doing that brings my machine to a halt when booting? What apps are being loaded that suck the RAM out of my machine?
My laptop is a Lenovo T61p, souped up with 4 GB or RAM, which are fully utilizable by the 64-bit edition of Vista Enterprise. On top of that it has a pretty decent video card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M with 256MB dedicated graphics RAM. It also sports an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU. Overall, I get a nice 4.8 on the Windows Experience Index).
This laptop has all the potentials to be a speedy work horse. It includes 3 USB ports and 1 FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3-in-1 card reader, DVD-ROM, and a 7200RPM hard drive. For a model that has been out on the market for the last 2 years, I would say that the only things that have seriously improved in laptops are the newer Quad-core CPUs, faster graphics, and bigger hard drives.
I have seriously considered re-paving the machine with Windows 7 for the next while, but the only thing keeping me from it is the downtime while I re-install all my required apps. If/when I do that, I will definitely post my updates and opinions on the process right here. I must say that Win 7 64bit, which is running on a secondary drive on my home desktop, has been a very stable and pleasant experience “out of the box”, much different than my first year on Vista.
I wonder what will be the replacement for the Lenovo T61p, under my employer’s equipment lease program – perhaps the W500?
