Bring T23 up to date with Windows 2000

[sjthinkpader]

I had the opportunity to install Windows 2000 and bring all the important utilities and drivers up to date for a T23. It was a lot harder than I expected:

1. The text file for the utilities and drivers were ambiguous since they cover both XP and 2000. So compatibility to T23 and Windows 2000 could be mutually exclusive.
2. Microsoft had stopped support for Windows 2000 several years before. So there are no Zero utility or WPA support from MS for example.
3. My familiarity with Windows 2000 had lapsed since I had been working on XP the last few years. So much trial and error ensured to find the latest supported updates, patches, drivers and utilities.

The hardware is a standard T23 plus an IBM Atheros 11abg miniPCI II card. Early on I realized without Zero Utility available in XP, I needed a native IBM card in order for the latest encryption schemes to work using Access Connection utility. So I selected a IBM 11abg miniPCI II card from the T4x series. no-1802 utility was used to eliminate the two ethernet adapter warning. The T23 had 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD and 1.2Ghz CPU. So any slowness in operation meant I have the wrong item installed.

OS
1. Restored Win2K from the Recovery partition first.
2. Installed Win2K SP4.
3. Installed cummulative Rollups for SP4.
4. Installed Windows Installer 3.1.
5. Installed .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 (redistributable version only, not bootstrap version).

Driver and packages
6. Used the IBM 11abg miniPCI II card package, driver version 7.4.2.134.

Access Connection
7. Used version 5.12. Later versions required .NET Framework 3.0.

This allowed the T23 to connect to my 802.11n access point using WPA-PSK and AES encryption. Access Connection worked perfectly. After defrag, it was a truly snappy computer.

I will cover Power Manager and Presentation Director later.

[sjthinkpader]

Power Manager

I liked the newer Power Manager much better than the Battery MaxiMiser and I knew it could be installed on much older Thinkpads than the text file indicated support.

So I installed the Power Manager version 1.30 on this T23/Windows2000 OS. But when I click on the battery icon in the SysTray, Battery MaxiMiser was still in the system.

I then examined the installed software via Control Console Add or Remove Program utility, Battery MaxiMiser was not listed. It was part of the Thinkpad Configuration utility. So I updated it to a later version and confirm that it is now a separate program listing. Then I ran the Power Manager installation again and this time it recognized Battery MaxiMiser was installed and asked for permission to uninstall it. After that everything worked fine.

Presentation Director

An older version of Presentation Director was installed by the recovery process. When I went to update it, the installation process persistently gave a error and I gave up on updating it.