How do I know if the Vista ordered with Thinkpad is 32-bit or 64-bit?

If you order a Thinkpad with Vista Home edition, is it 32 or 64 bit? in particular, x61s?

 

you specify what you want when you order.

 

But in "customize" page, it only displays choices of the OS without the bit info. Where can I specify?

 

I don't think Lenovo offers a 64 bit version of Home Premium. When I ordered my x200 Tablet, you could only get 64 bit with Business or Ultimate (I ended up buying Business for this reason [I also got an XP downgrade disc as well]). Therefore, your x61s will most likely have 32 bit Vista (only a negative if you plan on using 4GB+ of RAM).

You may also want to look at the Clean Install guide. If you can procure a 64 bit Vista install disc (this is actually quite difficult), you can install Vista Home Premium 64 bit using your key for Home Premium 32 bit. This is perfectly legal and should be relatively straight forward.

 

If you did not explicitly choose 64bit, you will be getting a 32bit OS.

 

Thanks. Now I do see one option that is business with 64 bit; all the others have no specification so presumably 32 bit.

When you customized yours, which option did you choose to get both Business and XP disc? I though if you choose the business with downgrade to XP, you would get XP installed, and perhaps a disc for business, but not the opposite as you seem to be saying??

 

Select "Genuine Windows Vista Business 64", this enables a second option (hidden if you have home basic/premium). Select "Microsoft Windows XP Professional US English RDVD [$0.00]".

This will give you a laptop with Vista Business 64 pre-installed (and Vista on the recovery partition). When you receive the laptop you should immediately make Vista recovery discs (just double click on the Q partition and follow the wizard). In the future if you decide you don't like Vista (for any reason) you can use the XP recovery disc to switch. You can then move back to Vista using the Vista recovery discs you made at a later date.

 

jonlumpkin, thank you so much. I suppose the XP disc can only be used on that particular computer, not another one?

 

That is certainly true from a legal standpoint as it is an OEM license. It may technically be possible to use it on another computer, but it wouldn't make much sense (the disc is for a Lenovo preload with drivers, software, and tweaks for that particular ThinkPad type [e.g. 7448 CTU in my case]).

 

And from your perspective, which OS do you prefer to use with tablet? I see you have 3 of them installed.

And, btw, thanks for writing so much about X200t - I made much choice because of you

 

In my opinion Vista is by far the best for tablets (and my OS of choice 90% of the time). It has surprisingly good handwriting recognition (it even picks up my awful cursive most of the time), the pen works for just about everything, the tablet input panel is docked to the side and expands with a quick mouse over. The overall design of Vista also seems better than XP for mouse (or pen) only navigation due to checkboxes on next to all files for selecting several non-sequential items at once w/o using the control key, thumbnails when mousing over items in the taskbar, and better search options. I also get the best battery life in Vista and aside from long startup/shutdown times and a few minor software/peripherals incompatibilities it works great.

I rarely use XP. I maintain it for the handful of applications/peripherals that do not work under Vista and when I want to run a single application with the minimum amount of overhead (I think Vista is better for multi-tasking due to its various caches, but XP is much lighter).

I really like a lot of things about Ubuntu, but a few things prevent me from using it more. I have been unsuccessful in getting the digitizer pen and TrackPoint scroll to work (I don't have much experience editing xorg.conf files). Also, I get the worst battery life (11 watts minimum for Ubuntu vs. 7 watts for XP and 6 watts for Vista) and a bad case of Penryn CPU whine as well. Plus, flash support on 64 bit versions of Linux is pretty sketchy (unlike Vista you can't run 32 bit processes on 64 bit flavors of Linux).