My Vista Experience
I reciently installed Windows Vista Buisness Edition on my ThinkPad T60p.
I thought it was going to be a huge pain to do a Clean Install since I only had upgrade disks, but I was able to just boot from the CD and select "Clean Install" in the options. I left my computer alone for awhile and let Vista just chug away until it installed.
I then ran a Windows Update and decided to install some of the IBM / Lenovo software that usually comes installed on a ThinkPad (Access Connections, the Fn Keys, ThinkVantage Software, Fingerprint software, etc.) This is where I started running into some problems.
I downloaded ThinkVantage System Update to make life a little easier when installing all the software.
This is where all my troubles started. A lot of the software did not work properly in Vista. After installing everything I had a problem that when I clicked a link in Internet Explorer, logged into my computer, or if I did just about anything, the Green Volume bars would appear on my screen.
I was really mad about this because here I am installing Vista on a "Windows Vista Capable" computer months after Vista has been out. I thought that they would iron out the bugs by now.
I have had problems with ThinkVantage software on XP such that if I did not install the software in the correct order, it did not work properly. I thought that maybe this was the case, so I decided to call up Tech Support to see if they could tell me the right order to install everything.
The lady that helped me was not that nice. At one point in our conversation she told me "You're going to have to call us back, I have other calls I need to attend to."
In the end, they were not able to help me. The lady just told me to reinstall my computer, despite how I had just did a clean install not even 2 hours ago.
I decided to eat some tacos and I felt better. When I came back I looked at the driver matrix for my T60p and sure enough there was an update to the software I was having troubles with, listed with today's date as when it was last updated.
I installed the latest version and my problems went away for the most part. I still see the Green Volume bar when I login, but that I can deal with that.
My next problem came trying to get my wireless to work. I have WPA-Secured SSID hidden network, and the wireless software that comes with Vista cannot seem to handle this type of setup. Luckily, IBM / Lenovo has a program, ThinkVantage Access Connections, that can manage wireless profiles. When I ran XP this is what I used, and it worked like a charm.
When I installed it on Vista, it would just give me an error every time I tried to run the program. This is one of those things where I really should have read the instructions on the web, because I needed to install their Interface Driver before installing Access Connections. After I installed this, my wireless worked great!