Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Lenovo Announces ThinkPads Preloaded With XP

Posted by kdawson on Thu Dec 06, 2007 10:35 AM
from the give-'em-what-they-want dept.
Operating Systems Software Windows
BBCWatcher writes "Lenovo just announced new ThinkPad T61 models preloaded with Microsoft Windows XP. Ironically they're called ThinkPad T61 'TopSeller' models. Lenovo says they're aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. The XP TopSellers are available immediately, and the part numbers are 6465-03U, 7658-04U, and 7664-06U (PDF links). "Lenovo recommends Windows Vista Business"? Not so much."
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: Lenovo Announces WinXP ThinkPads...Today by BBCWatcher (900486)
[+] Hardware: Thinkpad X300 Specs Leaked 372 comments
Kyokushi writes "Gizmodo reports that some specifications of a new ultralight Lenovo X300 have been leaked. 'It appears that Lenovo have themselves a new ultralight X300 series Thinkpad — and outside of the price and release date, we have all of the specs that you need to know. At a glance, some of the major features include: a 13.3-inch LED backlit 1440X900 screen, an ultralight 2.5 pound form factor, and Intel Merom Santa Rosa Dual Core CPU (2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz ), a 64 GB SSD, up to 4GB of DDR2 PC2-5300 memory, and 4 hours of battery life.' If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air." Update: 01/20 22:55 GMT by S : Corrected Gizmondo->Gizmodo.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Lenovo Announces ThinkPads Preloaded With XP 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Dell too. (Score:5, Informative)

    by RandoX (828285) on Thursday December 06 2007, @10:38AM (#21597559)
    When you pull up their laptop page, there are two links. "Customize with Windows XP" and "Customize with Windows Vista". Same price.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by PlatyPaul (690601)
      Easier than that: if you want an XP-loaded dell, just go here [dell.com].

      They're hardly pushing it (see quote below), but it's still very much an option.

      Windows Vista® is the latest Operating System release from Microsoft. Windows Vista® Home Premium1 & Windows Vista® Ultimate1 offer great features like Windows Media Center which allows you to easily manage your photos, videos, & audio files and the cool interface of Windows Aero is designed to make your computer experience dynamic and fu

  • This is news? (Score:5, Informative)

    by inphinity (681284) <rgbarron&gmail,com> on Thursday December 06 2007, @10:39AM (#21597561) Homepage
    Maybe I'm missing something, but we've been buying T61's with XP for months now, without any difficulty at all.

    And we're not some large megacorp either -- we buy maybe 2-3 computers every 6 weeks.
    • Yeah, I always thought that businesses had more choice when it came to the OS. They're had the option of XP ever since Vista came out.

    • Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Psychopath (18031) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:00AM (#21597893) Homepage
      I just bought one last week and had the choice of Vista or XP. I think the news is probably that they have now have canned SKUs for XP where maybe they didn't before? As in, you could always go on and customize a laptop to have anything you want, but companies buying in large quantities probably just use a canned SKU that has the bundle they want with everything, to save time. Just guessing, though.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by petermgreen (876956)
            Did you actually read my post?

            Most big companies are going to reimage anyway. If they buy with vista then they can easilly downgrade to XP without paying any extra but if they buy with XP then when they want to put vista on them (which they probablly will evenutally) they will have to pay to do so.

    • Re:Try a regular store (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BlueBat (748360) <flake@noSpAm.frontiernet.net> on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:20AM (#21598181)
      Try looking for XP in a regular store. You will not be able to find it. I have asked about having XP placed on the computer instead of the crappy Vista and was told that it was impossible. If you want XP preloaded on a machine anymore, you need to go to a website based business it appears. By the way, it was Circuit City that told me it was Vista only. I told them no way, I would go with Linux long before I would go to Vista. They told me I could get a Mac in that case and I told them I wasn't made of money it was XP or no way. They said no way.
      • The "brilliant" sales associates at Circuit City probably don't even know there's a difference between XP and Vista.
  • Personally, I'm just happy that they aren't jumping on the bandwagon and shoving Vista down our throats.

  • Consumer demand..? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ricebowl (999467) on Thursday December 06 2007, @10:46AM (#21597689)

    So the news is that a company selling computers is selling something that the consumer's been asking for? Who'd've thought it? While I'm glad that another company, following Dell and some others, has bucked the Microsoft line, I'm not sure that it's particularly astounding.

    On the other hand though, kudos to them for doing so. Now if only they'd lose the '$Company recommends Windows Vista $model' branding I'd be even more impressed. Why claim to recommend something that you fairly obviously don't? I'm aware that there are provisos from Microsoft for supplying lower-cost OEM software to these companies but, surely, at some point the marketing/PR departments are going to realise that trying to play on both sides of a particular game isn't going to look too good for them?

    Ah, me and my optimism...

    • Re:Consumer demand..? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Entropius (188861) on Thursday December 06 2007, @10:50AM (#21597733)
      Selling what the customer's asking for *is* astounding in today's world. It shouldn't be, but it is.
    • Let's look at a car analogy. If I was a car manufacturer, I could advertise that I recommended automatic transmissions, but that wouldn't mean that I wouldn't sell manual transmissions to those who wanted it. For some people, XP has advantages, for others, Vista is better. Same with automatic and manual transmissions. No one product is right for everyone, so they are selling both.
        • Maybe they are recommending Vista, because although XP works better for now, what happens when MS doesn't support it, or what happens what happens when some new program comes out that only works under Vista. IBM could have any number of reasons for recommending Vista over XP. And saying that they "recommend Windows" isn't much better. Which version do they recommend? Windows 3.1? Now they have to say, "Recommends Windows XP or Vista". But then why recommend anything, because you're recommendations are
    • AFAIK '$Company recommends Windows Vista $model', if printed everywhere, gets 'em many dollars from Microsoft. It's like with ads in magazines; the advertiser (in this case Microsoft) buys some space (and, in this case, a "recommendation") for lotsa money.
      With all the OEM discounts and marketing aid going on, I imagine that little line may be worth half the ad, so the marketing department damn sure won't remove it.

      Also, I don't think it's doing too much harm. Those interested in not getting Vista will u

    • So the news is that a company selling computers is selling something that the consumer's been asking for? Who'd've thought it?

      You know, pretty much every news event in the world can be similarly derisively portrayed when distilled to its more abstract or generic form. For example, if a plane crashed killing hundreds, you might say "So the news is that some plane crashed?" - there's nothing insightful about saying "Gee who'dve thought it?" (cynical remark != intelligent remark); just because it's well-know

    • at some point the marketing/PR departments are going to realise that trying to play on both sides of a particular game isn't going to look too good for them?

      Well, that may be true, but when the finance department tells the marketing department that the MS advertisement rebate which finances the marketing department is higher than their profit margin/machine and keeps them in business is dependent on that phrase appearing on their site, the marketing department will look the other way.

      MS may not be able to demand X dollars per maching, but they have a whole slew of other dirty tactics to use.

      dislaimer, this comment is unresearched and an unfair accusatio

    • Dont get excited. january 2008 is when MS will stop XP sales and preloads.
    • The marketing line is part of the OEM sales agreement. This is just like "We recommend Duracell batteries" which was required to get into the best pricing tiers. I don't know the exact deal Lenovo or Dell gets from Microsoft but I would say that if you were them you would probably do the exact same thing. When you become a publicly owned corporation your duty is to the shareholders, not to follow some ideological path which may or may not have some future goodwill benefit. Placing that line in the marke

  • Why Won't MS Do Dual Licensing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BigAssRat (724675) on Thursday December 06 2007, @10:57AM (#21597835)
    I am surprised that MS doesn't allow you to purchase a Vista license that allows the use of XP if you would rather. I bet then they could really beef up their Vista sales numbers, even if only on paper. Who would be able to say that 75% of users purchased Vista but installed XP instead? Looks like they could "win" the numbers game.

  • This is the end I tell you! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Toreo asesino (951231) on Thursday December 06 2007, @10:58AM (#21597859) Journal
    Haha! Microsoft will surely die now, what with all these companies choosing Windows XP instead of Vista!

    Wait a minute....
    • Actually, staying on XP does, indirectly, have a negative impact on MS. Since Vista went over so poorly, shareholders get irritated that all that money they spent on R&D isin't making much of a return, and thus don't want them to take a risk like this again. Vista must succeed for the shareholders to be happy.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Is there room for growth? Always. But I think shareholders are happy with MSFT regardless of Vista, considering they have revenue of US $50-60B/year and an operating income of over $20B/year a year. If Vista ends up being that big of a failure, they can always fall back on XP and continue maintaining and improving that. One of their big cash cows, the Office suite, seems to be doing great with many people rolling out Office 2007 on a large scale.
        • They should pull a Centrino. Just acknowledge that their latest sucks and go back and optimize and refresh XP. Use what they learned from Vista's development and not make the same mistakes.

      • Re:This is the end I tell you! (Score:4, Informative)

        by BUL2294 (1081735) on Thursday December 06 2007, @01:27PM (#21600247)
        What impact? Microsoft's shareholders don't care what the company does as long as the dough keeps rolling in... And it's rolling in--but for XP and not Vista. Case in point, how much money has M$ made on Internet Explorer? NONE. IE has been a total loss! Nobody ever bought a Windows PC "just to have IE". (Remember that as recently as 2000, IE5 was available for Macs, UNIX, and even Windows 3.1x!) To add, IE has cost M$ hundreds of millions in legal fees and EU sanctions... By definition, the shareholders should be revolting--but they're not.

        M$ has many other products like SQL Server, Exchange, Windows Server, and Office that bring in the dough, even if Vista totally fails...

  • And? (Score:4, Funny)

    by z0M6 (1103593) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:01AM (#21597899)
    At first I didn't really see the point. It is a laptop with windows XP. How was that news-worthy? Then I kind of remembered that vista is the new ME and it seems a lot of people think so too.

  • Vista to XP - upgrade or downgrade? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jkrise (535370) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:02AM (#21597915) Journal
    http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/VSTA-DWNGRD.html [ibm.com]

    The only downgrade from Vista to XP is the price.. .and hassles besides. Why does everyone insist XP is inferior compared to Vista? As far as the user eXPerience is concerned XP is way ahead of Vista, so it is an Upgrade.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by mgblst (80109)
      Some people actually like the new flashy stuff. Some people at my work. These are more the "decision" types, who don't actually have to use their computer for anything important, don't really now much about them, but still feel that they have earned to right to make decisions affecting us all.
    • But vista is NEW! And... SHINEY! And... it's got this cool bar that lets you put widge...errr... gadgets on it! Totally worth your RAM committing suicide.
  • Has this happened before, a mass downgrading from the latest Windows to the previous version? Have to say, not to my knowledge. Many people have said this happens with every new version of Windows. Really? I personally wasn't happy with going from 2k to XP because XP didn't add anything and was all cute/telly tubby and was a bit slower. Like many, after being on 2K became a problem I moved (on work machines you don't always have a choice), I moaned but that was it. Once I turned off all the crap I was f
  • I just bought a Thinkpad in the last 3 months.

    XP Professional was on many of the laptop configs. Just ask your salesmen if it wasnt. I just got the crappy Vista (home basic... whatever) and installed XP Pro and Ubuntu after fixing the partition map.

    I think the only place NOT to recommend XP are the touchscreen models, as Vista has better touchscreen support.

  • Been using a ThinkPad with Vista for half a year (Score:4, Interesting)

    by felix9x (562120) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:14AM (#21598093) Homepage
    I been using a ThinkPad X60 with Vista Business for six month. Generally I had no major issues and like how Vista works. Here are a few notes though:

    1. By default the CPU is set to run at half the speed. My notebook came with a 1.8Ghz Core2 Duo, but by default the power settings are set to run it at 900Mhz. In fact thats the only speed the laptop does not get hot as hell. Even at the lower speed most desktop apps work fast enough.

    2. I did a few tweaks myself like disable shadow copy and windows defender. I decided to leave the indexer on since I actually like what it provides.

    3. With the most recent updates I think a few annoying things got fixed. The laptop comes out of sleep faster and copying seems to be faster.

    4. Wireless networking sometimes is flaky. I don't know if Vista is responsible or its due to the interference where I live or its the lenovo wireless utils that are sluggish.

    5. I really like the minor UI improvements in Vista like the new resource monitor. I don't see why it cant be back ported to XP.

  • How is this news? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Junior J. Junior III (192702) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:17AM (#21598135) Homepage
    You could always order a CTO Thinkpad T61 with Windows XP Professional preloaded. It cost a bit more than Vista Home Basic, but the same as Home Premium or Business.

  • But... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bazman (4849) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:21AM (#21598197) Journal
    Can I buy one with neither and how well does Ubuntu run on it?

    We just bought a Sony laptop with Vista and poor techie had to spend ages upgrading it to XP... Yes, I do mean upgrading... Seems Sony don't do XP graphics drivers for this model, you have to use Win 2k ones with a modified .inf file or something...

    • Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)

      by BCW2 (168187) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:36AM (#21598449) Journal
      Check out Emperor Linux, they have T60s and T61s preloaded with a custom kernel so everything works out of the box. Been around for a few years and have had very good reviews from Linux Journal and others.

      Try http://www.emperorlinux.com/mfgr/lenovo/toucan/
    • For everything there is to know about running Linux on Thinkpads, you should check ThinkWiki [thinkwiki.org]. In particular, here's the page on Ubuntu on T61 [thinkwiki.org].

      From personal experience with Thinkpads, they are quite Linux-friendly. My old R51e has full hardware support in Linux. The latest version of Ubuntu works fine, in particular, and so does Debian.

  • Already upgraded. (Score:3, Informative)

    by binaryspiral (784263) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:42AM (#21598539)
    I ran with the factory Vista Ultimate image on my T61p (Core Duo 2.4Ghz 2GB Ram) for a month, and couldn't take the performance hit compared to XP on my R52 (Single Core 1.8Ghz 2GB Ram).

    After reading about the 1% perf increases of Vista SP1, I decided that wasn't good enough and nuked Vista, and installed XP - it's like I've weighed anchor and hoist ye misen mast.

  • Posted from a T61 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by norbac (1113477) on Thursday December 06 2007, @11:53AM (#21598739)
    I just received my brand new Lenovo T61 preloaded with Vista home basic. What a disaster... but not because of Vista, but instead because of all the pre-loaded junk. The taskbar had 7 icons in the notification area in addition to the ones from the OS, plus a useless battery power gauge that took up another big chunk of real estate (this side-by-side with the already existing Vista power gage, so I'm getting duplicate data). I actually took a screenshot [flickr.com] since I couldn't believe it. I did a quick registry check and counted 30 executables set to auto-start on login. On every log on I got nagging pop-ups about turning on some lenovo software. Launching IE brought up two tabs, one set to always load the lenovo page. It was a slow, annoying mess...

    I flattened the machine and installed a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate. With the all the cruft gone, things are now flying on the machine, and I'm quite happy with the OS. The difference is astounding.

    All these negative comments I kept hearing about Vista make sense now, but it's clear that at least some of the disenchanment is misdirected. Don't OEM's actually use the machines they send out?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by afroborg (677708)
      That has always annoyed me too. Why can't you buy a laptop with plain old windows installed on it? Why does it have to have a dozen irritating utilities, all of which insist on having a taskbar icon, and most of which simply duplicate functionality that already exists within the OS?

      Why would I need a branded wireless LAN config utility? The OS already does that
      Why would I need a "Modem Helper" utility? The OS already knows how to work a modem
      Why would I need a sound mixer utility? The OS has one alread
    • > What a disaster... but not because of Vista, but instead because of all the pre-loaded junk.

      Lenovo must be buckling under some sort of pressure. I bought an R60 (with XP Home) a little more than a year ago, and I was impressed by how much restraint they showed with the pre-loads. There was practically nothing. I did need to remove the stupid battery icon that you mentioned, and I actually started to LIKE to ThinkVantage stuff. But there were no free AOL trials, no irrelevant media players.

      Somebody
    • For the most part, the bitch at the link you posted is that there is a 2 or 3 second delay opening IE7.

      I'm sorry, maybe I just don't drink as much strong coffee as you, but that's not something that would motivate me to spend the time to write a review at Amazon. A 2 to 3 second delay in opening IE7? Terrible productivity issue for sure!

    • Microsoft has already done things far more worthy of prohibition than this, and were convicted in court for it ... and then the Bush administration conveniently dropped the case when they were appointed. I wish legislators would get off their ass and enforce the judgments that already exist.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by geekoid (135745)
      Like any relationship, it takes more then a beautiful face to live with someone day in and day out.
      • Think of it as a new, really hot girlfriend that doesn't speak your language. Or can't get it through her @#%$!)(@# head that the roll of toilet paper should be put with the paper coming out over the top!
      • So they are supposed to offer their computers with each different distribution pre-installed, or just your favorite?

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.