Where have all the country drivers gone...?

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beeblebrox · #1 Post by **beeblebrox** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 3:05 pm

I have a real problem.
I have here a T22 and a T20 which go to friends in France and Germany.

I've set up Winxp and installed the drivers. However I could not find the country specific Help files (i.e. ThinkPad button stuff).
The sites in German and French only offer the U.S. stuff.
IBM search is of no help.

Anyone know the hidden web sites?

s0larian · #2 Post by **s0larian** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 4:20 am

mostly there are no country driver anymore. Some software is multilingual and detects the language of the OS, some software just stays plain English.

Access IBM for different countries you can find here:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/

beeblebrox · #3 Post by **beeblebrox** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 12:15 pm

Finally I got a phone call from IBM service.

They told me that IBM withdraws country specific software for older models after some time. Only the plain US-English version remains.

Makes me wonder why they want to save those few megabytes on server space. Sounds ridiculous. The T22 was on sale only 3 years ago, and yet no drivers anymore.

n3il · #4 Post by **n3il** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 5:45 pm

As far as I remember there were never language specific drivers per se. There were different language web pages - but for the most part the files were the same as the English version web page.

The drivers downloaded from the IBM website will work fine on any language version of Windows. Most (if not all) of the applications will "autosense" and display in the installed Windows language [Over time many of the installer packages have become much, much larger to incorporate the different languages used on IBM preloads]

HTH

Neil

n3il · #5 Post by **n3il** » Thu Mar 24, 2005 6:06 pm

Oh yeah - there isn't a version of the "ThinkPad button stuff" for the T20 or T22 running Windows XP - because these machines were never preloaded with Windows XP.

Neil

beeblebrox · #6 Post by **beeblebrox** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 11:56 am

Sorry to confirm the contrary.
The "ThinkPad" button on the T2x series is an application program. It can be downloaded on all web pages, I found it on the German and French Web pages.
The application software used to be in German and French, but now they are only in English. On both German and French web pages.
They are not drivers, but application software.

I have Windows XP running in German and French. The "ThinkPad" buttons work perfectly, but bring up the English contents. That's what the IBM phone lady said as well. I hoped for some hidden web page with the original software, but even Google doesn't find anything.
The IBM search on theri web pages is useless.

Bummer!

#7 Post by **JaneL** » Sun Mar 27, 2005 1:00 pm

Perhaps new ThinkPad owners can learn a lesson from this. Instead of examining millions of pixels to find one that might be dead or stuck on or using a micrometer to measure the gap between the battery and the case, the time might be better spent downloading a full set of drivers, utilities, applications, manuals, documents, etc for their new TPs and backing them up in several places. And in burning their restore CDs.

Looks like I said something about downloading all the files several months ago:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... ght=#36385

I have all of mine, but, then, I remember the nomadic days of the driver matrix when it was a weekly game to find the new unpublished address for it.

Just a thought.

Where have all the country drivers gone...?

Where have all the country drivers gone...?

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