Thinkpads Forum

After having used "Software Installer" regularly to update my system for about a year now I have roughly 60 <some_cryptic_8_character_code_here>-directories and a slighly lower number of <some_cryptic_8_character_code_here>.exe files in my C:\Drivers directory (e.g. 1OVY08WW(.exe) or 79UZ03WW(.exe)).

Can one somehow automatically clean these up, i.e. just keep the latest versions? Or can I delete ALL of these dir's and exe's and just simply download the latest versions again? Or will SW Installer then be confused and declare all my current drivers as not being installed and suggest to reinstall them again?

Michael

mmo wrote:After having used "Software Installer" regularly to update my system for about a year now I have roughly 60 <some_cryptic_8_character_code_here>-directories and a slighly lower number of <some_cryptic_8_character_code_here>.exe files in my C:\Drivers directory (e.g. 1OVY08WW(.exe) or 79UZ03WW(.exe)).

Can one somehow automatically clean these up, i.e. just keep the latest versions? Or can I delete ALL of these dir's and exe's and just simply download the latest versions again? Or will SW Installer then be confused and declare all my current drivers as not being installed and suggest to reinstall them again?

Michael

Go to the C:\Drivers directory and delete all the directories whose names are a combination of letters and numbers. Don't delete the two text files that are not in a directory.

This should free up several gigabytes and if you have already installed everything you wanted that was downloaded, there will be no problems. All this stuff can be downloaded again, anyway, should you change your mind. The only downside would be if you were away without internet access and a Thinkvantage application or Lenovo-downloaded driver became corrupted. In that rare situation you would not be able to reinstall the driver or application in question from your hard disk contents, because you had removed the installer package. My own experience with reinstalling applications and drivers from the installer packages has not been good as it has not fixed problems that have developped. Rather, I've needed to download new versions which (sometimes) fixed the problems I was having. The old versions just gave me the same problems all over again.

I'd delete this stuff without hesitation.

Ken Fox wrote:
Go to the C:\Drivers directory and delete all the directories whose names are a combination of letters and numbers. Don't delete the two text files that are not in a directory.

The two files are install.log and connect.log? Presumably one can also delete all the .exe files in C:\Drivers?

What about the files in C:\IBMTOOLS directory? (In my case this is much bigger than C:\Drivers.)

Hi Ken,
I removed the mentioned files and directories and so far, SW Installer seems happy.

Thanks,
Michael

Since I am at it - another question (maybe I should rather start a new thread...):

There are a few packages (namely ThinkVantage Fingerprint SW, ThinkVantage System update and MS Windows XP SP2 High Definition Audio Driver Package) which I have already installed several times each but which WS Installer keeps falsely declaring as being "Not Installed". Is there a way to "force" these to be installed? I mean: can one enter or add them somewhere as being already installed so that WS Installer stops presenting them?

Michael

mmo wrote:Since I am at it - another question (maybe I should rather start a new thread...):

There are a few packages (namely ThinkVantage Fingerprint SW, ThinkVantage System update and MS Windows XP SP2 High Definition Audio Driver Package) which I have already installed several times each but which WS Installer keeps falsely declaring as being "Not Installed". Is there a way to "force" these to be installed? I mean: can one enter or add them somewhere as being already installed so that WS Installer stops presenting them?

Michael

I've had some situations like this as well. One thing that I've done is to uninstall the Software Installer and then to reinstall it manually. This might reset it so that it knows better what is and is not installed.

On the whole, though, it really doesn't matter what SI thinks is installed if you "supervise" this program, which is what you must do or you will ultimately end up with serious problems like the disaster that PC Doctor can do to your registry. Every time you run SI, you should look at what it proposes to download and uncheck any boxes for stuff you don't want. You should do the same when it comes time to install stuff that has been downloaded. Don't install anything you aren't reasonably certain you need.

I basically did the same thing as Ken suggested. But I was a little bit more cautious, I deleted all the files in those directories but kept the .xml files. I noticed that those xml files contains version information of all the downloaded packages. I had the same fear as you have, I thought deleting the xml's will confuse the SW installer, and will prevent it to find new updates to my drivers/utilities.

But I guess an easy experiment would be, noting down what SWI reports when it scans, and then trowing all the files to recycle bin, and comparing the SWI results with the old one. If anything fails you can just restore them back.

IBMTOOLS is basically the same thing but instead of device drivers, it contains preloaded sowtwares like thinkvantage, presentation director, rescue and recovery, etc.

My experience is that if the driver or software was not installed using Software Installer, then Software Installer may not 'see' that it is installed, even though it is. This causes no problem with the driver or software itself, but it does cause a problem in that Software Installer still wants to install it or upgrade it. IMO, the best way to fix this is to unistall the driver or software, then let Software Installer do the installation.

You can let Software Installer do everything from the beginning or you have the option of downloading the driver or software manually from Lenovo's site to your hard drive, execute the file to extract it's contents, then let Software Installer find it on your hard drive and install it (be sure and uncheck box to: Retrieve latest information on the internet). There is still one potential problem though. There are a few driver and software updates that when downloaded from Lenovo and executed - begin their complete installation routines. The only way to tell which packages do this is to read the installation instructions for the package in question.