Windows 10: Would Win10 upgrade solve interrupt conflict in Win7 on R61i?

Hello,

I have a Thinkpad r61i. It had Vista on it when I bought it, but I replaced it with Ubuntu. Then I got the chance to try out Windows 7 on it, but I had what appears to have been an interrupt conflict between the graphics and the USB bus which meant that video would play back at 2 or 3 fps and audio through a USB interface was choppy. I could find no way to resolve this so I switched back to Ubuntu. However now I need to run Windows. I've read about the free upgrade to Windows 10. If I got myself an OEM copy of Windows 7 and upgraded to Windows 10, would the upgrade be likely to solve the interrupt conflict problem? After all, the problem wasn't there until I upgraded to Windows 7.

Thanks.

:)

 

ual boot system upgrade to windows 10

Thanks Jessen for the hint. I was expecting a yes or no answer, since I already have a dual boot system(xp+win7), and if I upgrade win10 from win7 boot, would win7 be replaced by win10 and becomes a (xp+win10) dual boot system?

But it looks more complicated than I thought, should I check current system has xp and win7 are installed in DIFFERENT partitions, otherwise xp would be gone after win7 is upgraded to win10 if xp and win7 are in SAME partition?

 

yet another Win10-clean-install-with-Win7-key question

I find much conflicting info, hoping for a definitive answer from The Community. I heard that the Win10 Threshold update now allows clean install using Win7 keys.

I have an empty hard disk and a brand-new Win7 Ultimate 64-bit install disc with a valid, never-used product key. Can I use the never-activated Win7 key to activate a Win10 clean install? Or do I really have to waste time installing Win7 then "upgrade"
to a clean install of Win10? Thanks!

 

Probably not. Nearly every upgrade version of Windows I've used have carried over problems from the previous version. Sounds to me like the appropriate drivers for devices are not being installed in Windows. I see the main thing about installing Win7 or Win8.1 before Win10 is the ability to get the free Win10 and that an update called Get Windows 10 or GWX will check the computer for compatibility. I've not found many issues with Win8.1 but do use the Classic Shell to get some features easier to deal with for what I do but as others are wont to say, YMMV [Your Mileage May Vary].

 

Thanks for your reply.

You say that there may have been something wrong with the way the drivers were installed. I downloaded all the drivers from Lenovo's web site and installed them manually. Is there a way I could have messed up while I was doing this?

 

It's hard to say what issues the drivers have, could be a bad download, could be they are not exactly correct for the machine, etc. I have an old Gateway Vista Notebook that Win10 32-bit can't find drivers for the Mass Storage Controller but everything else is working just fine.

 

I downloaded all the drivers from Lenovo's R61i download page, so it would have been hard for me to make a mistake. I can't 100% rule out a bad download, but wouldn't a bad download much more likely have resulted in a total failure rather than a partial malfunction? Coming to think of it, I've got an install disk for an OEM Win7 which allows a few days grace before it demands the licence key. Maybe I can try again with that on a spare disk, and if it works then I can buy a proper copy and then do the upgrade once Lenovo publish the Win10 drivers. Does Win10 perform OK on old notebooks (1.5GHz Core2Duo with Intel 945GM graphics)?

 

One approach: download the .iso for the technical preview build 10162 and install it. It may be close enough to the release version of Windows 10 to check the performance.

I'm not sure how well a 945GM graphics controller will work. Intel lists it as a DX9 device. That meets the minimum requirement for Windows 10, but it's old enough that Intel offers no new drivers for it. Maybe Microsoft's will be adequate.

 

Thanks very much for your help. I'll give the technical preview a try.

 

I'm not getting the choppy video or the stuttering sound in the technical preview of 10 so, unless something different happens when I install 7 and then upgrade to 10, I should mark this as solved.

 

Thanks for the update. I wish that everyone followed through on their posts.

 

My son's R61 has W10 build 10162 installed from scratch and seems to have no problems. It only required a few drivers from Lenovo (W8/8.1 ones did just fine) - PM device, Synaptics, Ricoh SD/MMC reader, Hotkey manager.