U330 and Windows 7 - how is it?

I want to upgrade my girlfriend's Ideapad U330 to Windows 7. RTM is fantastic on my laptops, a XPS 1530M, a Toshiba Qosmio and a standard netbook. How is it on the U330? Whereas I have quite a few systems, she relies on hers for school and I don't want to chance it if it's just not stable.

She has Vista now (which came with the unit) and it's never been particularly stable. She has freezes and crashes regularly, and it's slow. I gather that the standard out of box load has a significant amount of bloatware.

My biggest concern is whether the switchable graphics feature continues to work under W7.

Advice welcomed... I'll only have a couple of days to do it so the more knowledge I can arm myself with, the better.

 

I'm pretty sure that switchable graphics will not work inside of Windows 7, but you can switch it in the BIOS before booting into the operating system. Lenovo also has beta drivers/programs out for Windows 7 and you can give those a try.

 

You may wish to consider what your girlfriend wants.

 

As far as our knowledge goes, don't expect switchable graphics in 7 for now. And they don't from the BIOS, from there you can never power off the ATI card, even when switching it to use the Intel chip. Lenovo says that adding another option to the BIOS would be adding a 'feature' and they don't do that for released products.

If Vista is crashing often, that means you're doing something very wrong (excluding hardware faults). Or she is.

 

She wants a stable laptop that runs faster than her current one does. She also has used W7 on mine and asked if I could install it. I do not want to do so without understanding what the compatibility issues are, hence my asking here.

It sounds like the U330 is not W7 ready or friendly at the moment so I will probably just do a clean Vista install. From the limited time I've spent with it, I've gotten the sense that the instability is due to initial bloatware plus too much software installed since purchase.

 

That would only make it slow. Instability sounds like bad security or ""tweaking"".

 

That is incorrect. Instability can also be caused by poorly designed software, bad drivers, and/or driver conflicts.

In any case, it appears Lenovo dropped the ball on the U330 - it appears to have little to no driver support under any OS beyond those packaged with the initial release. This forum was not particularly helpful but the Lenovo forums made it clear that there is no Windows 7 support at this time and the U330 appears to have a reputation for crashing due to device driver bugs (power management, switchable graphics) that were identified but in 12 months have not been fixed.

Perhaps drivers will be available by official launch, but it seems that Lenovo is struggling with switchable graphics and the other unique features of this model. In the meantime, we re-installed Vista and it seems to be running a bit better.

 

Great post and 100 percent correct. Lenovo tends to be more responsive with their ThinkPad line when it comes to new technology and related. As for switchable graphics, this is, and always has been a hack—to the point where Microsoft is discouraging manufacturers from implementing the feature in Windows 7 (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2942 for detalis).

 

As for W7 support for the U330, sit tight.

 

+1

changing to a new operating system won't help you in the least if you are already having vista problems.