to clear up some reformat issues

[liquid_sonata]

hello,

i've been avidly reading these forums since making my t42p purchase. it should be here within the week. i plan to do a clean install of windows xp. however i have some questions as to the purpose of the recovery cds. however i'm still a bit confused as to the nature of recovery cds and the reformatting process in general.

(1) as i understand it the recovery cds merely exist to give you all the factory applications and drivers back after a clean install (which is done only to recover the ibm_service partition). agree or disagree?

(2) do the recovery cds allow you to selectively install apps and drivers? (if they didn't it would be kind of purposeless to do a clean install anyway, since things won't run much faster - everything will be practically the same as it was originally?)

(3) i suppose i could copy the ibmtools, i386, drivers, support and valueadd folders somewhere onto my network and just install the files from there after i do a clean install of xp, or are the recovery cds the only way to go?

(4) what is special about the i386 folder?

(5) my plan is to first copy all these special folders or have the recovery cds, do a clean install of xp while wiping out the entire hd, and proceeding with loading my apps and drivers onto the machine from there from my network. do you foresee any problems or see any errors in this plan?

gratefully,
l. s.

p. s. - i've been reading so many complaints lately on the forum about hardware and service problems on ibm's part. i'm now duly worried and i really hope that this thinkpad purchase is worth it.

[sktn77a]

1. No. The OS is on the recovery CDs. It partitions, formats, installs OS, installs apps and creates a recovery partition on the HD. You cannot install the apps after a clean install from an OEM CD it will just overwrite it !

2. I'm not aware that you can do this either - I think it's pretty much all-or-none!

5. See mtbiac posts today. You might be spending some time sorting all this out. You may want to give the factory install a chance before you decide to wipe it all out.

[mtbiac]

yeah, give the factory install a chance. Uninstall and disable everything that you dont want. You will actually get faster performance in games with the IBM setup compared to a clean install with the latest drivers. However, I've run into other problems such as audio skipping no matter what I do, and I have no idea what to do next. I've tried everything

good luck

[primedude]

Normally when I first get a computer, the first thing I do is to wipe off all the factory-default stuff and start fresh with a new copy of XP. For whatever reason, I didn't feel compelled to do that with my Thinkpad. There are a lot of drivers running in the backtground and a lot of icons in the system tray, but I really feel like everything I'm running is well designed and reasonably relevant to the operation of my system. To second the thoughts above, don't be afraid to give the factory set of software a shot. You might be pleasantly surprised; I was.

[liquid_sonata]

thanks for the sane and moderate advice . it is a sort of impulsive thing to just immediately wipe the hd. i'll give it a try. mtbiac - i empathize with you. why don't you call ibm about fixing the bad audio? i think it sucks that buying a product that costs so much is not far from taking a gamble on whether the system works properly or not. yet from what i have read on recent threads here thinkpad dysfunction is by no means ubiquitous.