I bought an old X41 Thinkpad with a docking station including DVD rom.

Somebody had installed copy of Windows 7 on it, which works but is very slow. I only use it for internet, email and some basic applications. All would run fine under XP.

I want to get rid of 7 and reinstall XP as it should be more suitable for the spec of the machine.

However, I can get the machine to boot from the drive with the install disk and it starts the installation but fails before completion.

Am I missing something obvious? I know these machines have a strange sized hard drive, does it need some jumper configuration on the hardware? Do I need to re-format the drive and start it totally clean?

Would be better to try Linux?

I have tried Google but cannot find an explanation.

Thanks for nyour help.

ignore me…

X41 – max of 1.5GB RAM – XP would run very nicely on that laptop.

Is it the Laptop ( http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-59145 ) or Tablet ( http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-60014 )

Drivers/manuals etc are all available on the Lenovo website.

I wouldn’t bother – I have an X41 tablet running Windows 7, performance is no worse than when it was running XP. You can get a bit of a speed up from it if you slip an SSD drive in, probably not too expensive these days.

it starts the installation but fails before completion.

Am I missing something obvious?

You’re missing explaining how it fails. Error messages?

Do I need to re-format the drive and start it totally clean?

Going from 7 to XP, almost certainly.

Is there no recovery partition on it? Might have been blown away when the previous owner W7’ed it, but you might be able to get into some sort of ‘factory reset’ mode with one of the F-keys and / or the blue IBM button if it has one.

Ubuntu has good support for Thinkpads, and is fairly easy to get to grips with in terms of doing basic surfing and email.

Can’t see the detailed spec from the link above, but if it has a SATA interface for the hard drive putting in an SSD should help speed things up a bit.

In the BIOS make sure the SATA mode is not set to ACHI.

I like ‘L’ubuntu on my old laptop.

get linux on it, nowt to lose really

ubuntu is good, I’m using Linux mint at the moment and it’s really good – try the XCFE or KDE versions if it’s not a super powerful as these are lighter versions

Kubuntu is hardly lightweight!

xubuntu is… sort-of.