Installing Windows 7 on Lenovo Thinkpad T500

Got a new laptop two weeks ago, a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with P8400 processor running at 2.4 GHz, 15" non-led tft at 1600x1050 and switchable graphics (Intel 4500 integrated and Radeon HD3650). It seems really cool running, which was my number one complaint with my old laptop (3 year old HP nc8430/T7200@2GHz/Radeon X1600). Although, I should point out that I haven't used the radeon graphics of the Thinkpad yet. It could suffer from the same problems that plagues the HP, if you use an external monitor, the Radeon automatically kicks into "high performance mode", making it extremely hot and therefor very noisy. See this thread on HP's business support forums for more info.

Other than installing Windows 7 on it I haven't had much time to mess around with it (it's been alot of work the last couple of weeks). Anyway, two days ago I finally got the last missing pieces for the new setup (2 GB extra DDR3-memory) and decided to finally get around to installing the Intel X25-M G2 inside it.

Although I didn't have much installed on the harddrive, I had already figured out and installed the correct Win7 drivers on it. To spare me the boring job of doing this all over again, I opted to use Clonezilla to copy the contents of the harddrive to the new SSD.

Only problem was that the built-in drive was 320GB and the SSD only 160GB. Due to this, Clonezilla wouldn't let me clone the partition as it stood. Scratching my head for a while, I googled and found the ntfsresize utility. After issuing the command "ntfsresize -s 100G /dev/sda1" I started waiting. And waiting. I switched console and ran top, noticing ntfsresize drawing 100% cpu with nearly no IO. A good 30 minutes after starting it, I interrupted it and decided to re-install Windows all over again.

I powered off the computer, disassembled the "cage" for the harddrive and installed the ssd instead. Booted up and installed Windows 7, and the drivers (which was quite quick, now that I had sorted out which ones were necessary). Then I booted with clonezilla once again, to take a backup of the freshly installed system, in case I should screw something up during install of the necessary programs.

These are the Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Windows 7 drivers I wound up installing:

• ricoh multicard reader - got rid of 2 unknown devices
• system interface - needed for hotkeys I believe
• hotkey
• power management driver and power manager
• management engine and serial over lan - got rid of 1 or 2 unknown devices
  
• ultranav1 and ultranav utility
• switchable graphics
• easyeject driver/application - I haven't yet installed this one, not sure that I need it
  

Additionally, after trying out rmclock and a few other utilities which apparently do not work on Windows 7 (or atleast not with my setup), I tried a (non-free) utility called Cpugenie. I mostly use it for cpu-temperature readings, but can optionally also control the speedstep / downclocking of the cpu for you. All in all, the P8400 processor inside my Thinkpad T500 seems really, really cool-running compard to my T7200 from my old HP nc8430.