Thinkpads Forum

Building a T60 corporate XP Pro image.

Spent the past 3 weeks building a stable T60p image,

1st week, using our normal desktop XP hardware independent image, installed XP Pro base onto T60p. Then we downloaded and installed all the latest drivers.

Upon testing we’ve gotten numerous freezing and lockups, usually locks up when the T60p is on battery power and the minute you take the network cable off the port. Or the minute we remove the thinkpad off the docking station it freezes. Other cases, once it boots up on battery, the keyboard and mouse freezes but you can hit FN key and see the wireless OSD.

So we decide to test and put the Lenovo OEM XP Pro Image back on, the T60p runs and performs rock solid with their OEM XP image.

The next try, we installed XP Pro clean from scratch, installed all the drivers including all the Thinkpad utilities and even used the Software Installer to check for updates, then applied 1 BIOS firmware update. Same behavior as before, it would lockup when it is on battery and off the network. Seems like a power management issue so we looked at all the patches that suppose to address this and installed them, still same behavior.

My question is, has anyone wiped their T60p and installed XP Pro cleanly with great success?

BTW, countless thinkpads and Dell laptops at our jobs using the same installation guidelines has not had so much problems as the T60p has has.

vision33r wrote:My question is, has anyone wiped their T60p and installed XP Pro cleanly with great success?

Yes; many times on many T60p units of varying configurations, with perfect success every time.

I installed Win XP Pro on my wife's T60p, without any problems. However, I do not install most of the Lenovo Thinkvantage software. I only loaded the fingerprint reader software, HD Active protection software.

The system is rock solid. The only other thing I would check is to install the latest INF files for the system chipset from Intel. This seems to have resolved the only issue we had of the keyboard/mouse not alway working upon boot/resume.

Thats a very good suggestion.. funny that you mentioned.. today there's a chipset driver update from Lenovo on their support page.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62939

I wonder if this fixes it, I will confirm this next week.

I had all kinds of weird freezing problems after updating my T42p image to the T60p until I read this article and realized I was using the wrong HAL/kernel drivers:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/237556/

When you go into task manager, does it show 1 or 2 cpu graphs? If 1, you are using the wrong drivers.

dsalyers wrote:I installed Win XP Pro on my wife's T60p, without any problems. However, I do not install most of the Lenovo Thinkvantage software. I only loaded the fingerprint reader software, HD Active protection software.

The system is rock solid. The only other thing I would check is to install the latest INF files for the system chipset from Intel. This seems to have resolved the only issue we had of the keyboard/mouse not alway working upon boot/resume.

are the other thinkvanage software is safe to delete? because I'm planning to use only the same programs as you the finger reader & the active protection sys.

not a T60p but i've put a clean XP build on my T60 with no problems *touch wood*

creed_mty wrote:

are the other thinkvanage software is safe to delete? because I'm planning to use only the same programs as you the finger reader & the active protection sys.

I can't imagine why you couldn't. Although you may want to leave the configuration manager as I am not sure how easy it is to update the bios with out it. But either way you can always get any of the ThinkVantage software from Lenovo.

Please keep us posted on your progress - I plan to do the same when I get a chance.

One of my testers came back to me today and said the latest BIOS update from Lenovo that I installed last week seemed to be holding.

I did perform the chipset update from Lenovo as well.

We have another image that I built up from reverse engineering their vendor image.

- This involves installing our XP Pro Corp edition over the OEM image to use our Corp key.

- Then uninstall any junk we didn't need and cleanup the registry

This image has so far proven the most stable so far.

One comment I have is, I've never seen a laptop that needed that many driver/bios updating to run stable. One browse over at lenovo and you can see that the T60p gets atleast 3-4 driver update a week just for XP, yet their Vista support has been pretty weak so far but thats another discussion.

creed_mty wrote:

dsalyers wrote:I installed Win XP Pro on my wife's T60p, without any problems. However, I do not install most of the Lenovo Thinkvantage software. I only loaded the fingerprint reader software, HD Active protection software.

The system is rock solid. The only other thing I would check is to install the latest INF files for the system chipset from Intel. This seems to have resolved the only issue we had of the keyboard/mouse not alway working upon boot/resume.

are the other thinkvanage software is safe to delete? because I'm planning to use only the same programs as you the finger reader & the active protection sys.

It depends what your IT policy is. We have those tools uninstalled and removed. I keep another T60p with the original image and use that as my base test rig to download the updates and try them out with the Thinkvantage software.

Then once a driver or software update has been thoroughly tested I simply grab the installation from the folder and push it out to other laptops.

I have a nearly 5gb partition on my hd, formatted with FAT32. is this the "hidden" partition that contains the backup software and diagnostics? I want to know before I delete it.

cubensis wrote:I have a nearly 5gb partition on my hd, formatted with FAT32. is this the "hidden" partition that contains the backup software and diagnostics? I want to know before I delete it.

Yes

OK, this now has to be my top priority - several of my users in the field are experiencing completely random lockups (complete freeze, requires power-cycle to continue). Sometimes it happens after undocking, or after sleep, but today I got a call from a user saying he was in the middle of highlighting text in a word document! It's happened to me too, several times, no discernible pattern.

I've been hanging onto to original Lenovo build in the hope I can make sense of it, but I doubt I'll ever have the time to get real value out of their 'value added (?)' software even if it were any good - so - time to rebuild from scratch. Now I discover that I didn't get any media with my lenovo's ... and my CDW rep has no clue either. We're too small to have volume licensing from MS, so I'm now going to have to figure out how to get the XP Pro media from Lenovo in a form where I can do a clean, generic install - I hope that's possible legally! Then I want to add the HD shock protection, Fingerprint reader, and ... maybe ... the battery maintenance utility (I like the way they let you choose how the recharge works - good in principal if nothing else). Of course, I guess I also need a bunch of lenovo-specific drivers too (as opposed to application stuff) - chipset, display, etc - and I guess some dreaded keyboard software to allow all those 'Fn' keys to work.

Has anyone done this based on windows XP media available from Lenovo, and downloads from their site? I have my own XP Pro media, but we are a small startup and I'm trying to do everything 100% by the book at the moment.