Can the Rescue & Recovery CD's be used for both my Thinkpads?

Both of my T61 and x61s run on Windows XP professional. I have the rescue & recovery disc's for my T61. Do I still need to create rescue & recovery CD's for x61s or the ones I have can be used for both?

And btw if in future I want to change to Vista, how?

 

The reason I ask is that I have two sets of Rescue & Recovery for my T61, one was created by myself, the other was sent by IBM. On the latter, it simply says "for use with Lenovo PC's only". It doesn't seem to be specifically for the T61. So is that enough for my x61s also? Thanks for your patience

 

I would create the CDs for both. Each laptop will have a different set of components and hence drivers.

If they were identical models (e.g. both T61 type 2373) you could probably get by with a single set. However, because they are different you are better off making one set for each if you can.

 

What would happen if I used the recovery CD for T61 on the X61s? Will it simply not work, or will it harm the computer? Thanks.

 

The Lenovo provided Rescue & Recovery Discs will work on both Thinkpads. They have a wider range of drivers than the disks created from ones computer.

 

I doubt it would harm it.

 

Since the recovery discs should install an pre-activated copy of Windows, I would guess that there might be issues, as serial numbers from the machine's hardware are polled when Windows is activated, and those would differ between your two notebooks.

 

If it's already pre-activated, when would you need to activate it again?

 

Not activate it again, but if you want to download certain Microsoft patches or applications, validation is required. I don't know if validation itself actually verifies your hardware profile, but I do know someone who used an illegal copy of XP for quite some time, when out of the blue Windows started popping up messages during bootup saying he may be running an invalid copy of Windows (not the exact wording, I only saw it the once when he showed it to me and don't remember exactly what it said). It told him something to the effect of some features may be disabled until he entered a valid key.

I don't know the details of how Windows activation works or what sort of ongoing validation happens, but I would just guess that the activation process isn't so easily circumvented. I've never heard of people who both owned the same model of a particular laptop or PC being able to share recovery disks. I could be wrong, though. /shrug

 

FYI, I just saw this post at another forum where someone said:

"I’m also here to confirm that the XP recovery disks from a T61 will recover an X61s with no problems. After the install, I downloaded and installed the ACHI utility, and the laptop is running just great with ACHI enabled."

(I've no idea what ACHI stands for, though )

Thanks all again!