Installing Vista 64 bit on a Thinkpad T61p

This is pretty much what I did with my Thinkpad T60 a few months ago, although I am crippled with a Core Duo and not a Core 2 Duo, so I could not get any 64-bit goodness. I have been looking at eBay auctions of Core 2 Duo chips and they are very tempting, especially around Christmas time.

Anyway, if you want a very nice step by step install guide for 64-bit Vista with newer Thinkpads, check out the article here.

About the only thing I do differently is keep the amount of Lenovo add-on applications to a minimum. I don't use the Lenovo update program. I also scour the series of tubes of the internet for newer wireless and wired network drivers. I have the ATI X1400 chipset, which means I need to use Mobility Modder on the newer releases to keep ahead of Lenovo. It is pretty much essential if you want decent graphics performance.

The last thing I do, especially due to having two SATA hard drives in my laptop, is install the Intel Matrix AHCI/RAID drivers, which are now up to v7.8.0.1012.