Enhanced Experience 2.0 after the fact?

I am looking at my online shopping cart at NewEgg. In it is a 40GB Intel 310 mSATA SSD, down to $89.99 after a coupon only good through the end of tonight. I am very tempted to order this for my upcoming ThinkPad T420.

Does anyone know if it's possible to set up Lenovo's Enhanced Experience 2.0 on a ThinkPad after they've got it? I'm finding this very intriguing, as I didn't think I'd see an SSD at a price I'd spend money on. I still need the HDD capacity, but my Scorpio Black 500GB can handle that.

I'm assuming there has to be a way to reload one's ThinkPad with the EE 2.0 software should they need to start from scratch, which is what I was planning when my T420 arrived anyway. Has anyone done this?

 

You can create Rescue and Recovery cd/dvd from the original installation of the T420. I would presume this includes the special EE features by Lenovo.

More about this can be found here: Enhanced Experience 2 After Windows Clean Install

 

Thanks for the link. I decided to go with an 80GB due to the better specs and the knowledge that if I went with the 40GB now, I'd want the 80GB in six months.

Hopefully if not now, in time, it will be possible to fully replicate the Enhanced Experience 2 install.

Side note: For those who are interested, there's one user-review on NewEgg that mentions successfully putting one in a T420, and another one or two on the ThinkPad.com forums, so it appears Lenovo has not whitelisted their Intel SSD cards.

 

i don't think EE is going to make a huge performance difference once you have a SSD installed. i don't have any quantitative tests, but my t60 with SATA I and a samsung 470 SSD already boots up pretty fast.

i might upgrade to the t420 as well except with an intel 80gb 320 ssd.

 

I have done both. RR restore to mSATA with "EE2" environment and a clean install. I can't tell the difference.

I do believe you can tweak an environment to get to a 10-12 second boot time as demonstrated by Lenovo, but I am getting 30-35 boot times non domain joined and thing that's a pretty normal boot time from a SSD. And yes, that's 30-35 on the 80GB Intel Series 310 in the slot on a W520.

Rock and roll baby.

 

the more i read about lenovo EE, the more i think it's just for marketing. how often do you have to boot/reboot your? 2-3 times a day at most?

 

Agreed. To answer your question, the number of boots depends on my location. Sometimes once per day. Other days it might be 5-6 times. Either way, waiting on the freeway in traffic amounts to a lot more time and expense.

 

Sounds good.

Do you know if it can be done off the Recovery discs? I'll be swapping my 500GB Scorpio Black in from my T400 to replace the 250GB stock.