Thinkpads Forum

The fun continues. With this T61, there seems to be new issues almost daily. My patience is running thin and I'm about to switch to something else and never come back.

I seem to have gotten past my blue screen issues by disabling Turbo Memory.

However, I continue to have issues with lockups when installing software. No clue what's causing this, but reboots seem to alleviate the problems.

Recurring and unresolved issues with the T61 and the advanced dock. Here is a summary of the issues...

1. When docking the laptop and cold booting, it does NOT default to the native resolution of my external LCD. I have to change to the correct resolution manually every time. When I do this, my icons scatter and I have to spend 2 or 3 minutes every time rearranging. Really sucks...

2. If I try to undock from the advance dock, the T61 seems confused what I'm trying to do and normally the screen will blank out and never come back. Often, I have to do a hard shutdown.

3. Today, a mysterious file folder (name A) appeared on my C drive and although it appears to be a virtual disk, I can actually double click on it and it will say it is currently empty. However, I can't delete it and it says that it is 150MB in size. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of it.

If it weren't for the docking issues, it would probably be OK, but I use the dock daily. My former T60 never had these issues and the MBP (Macbook Pro) that I occasionally use works fine with the external LCD.

Definitely not a happy camper with this T61. Not to mention the rather dismal battery performance.

Well the issues are for sure the combination of Vista and Lenovo drivers. I don't think you could do a workaround installing XP and waiting let's say 6 months and hope new drivers make the interaction with the docking station the correct behaviour.

I've browsing some HP business laptops, I really liked the nc8430 with the X1600 MR.

install XP

shuffle2 wrote:install XP

I purchased the T61 because as a software developer, I have to ensure compatibility with Vista. We've put it off for as long as we can and the time has come to run Vista with Aero.

Vista definitely has it's quirks, but I can't really say for sure if it's Vista or if it's the T61. Perhaps the combination is what makes it so bad.

A while back I installed Vista on my T42, very frequently I encountered problems 1 & 2 just as you described. Sleeping, docking, & un-docking were much better in XP both before and after my Vista experiment.

Sorry to hear about all your problems. I have a beefy pc running Vista and i experience alot of issues on it.

I too just got a T61 for work yesterday. Took about a day getting everything right but I'm now been running on XP Pro with all my developement tool and all updates and core IBM sofware and drivers installed.

Personally, I hate vista. It's a pig and it's far from being stable enough for me to switch to it fulltime. I use it for it's media center on my home theatre PC, bout all it's good for in my books...and that needed ALOT of tweaking to get it rt.

Best of luck with your T61. If you can use XP i say switch. Very fast notebook on XP, flies compared to my T42p. I played with my T61 a couple hours yesterday with Vista Ultimate, it was like fat albert compared to it running on XP... fat and slow;)

xtr wrote:Well the issues are for sure the combination of Vista and Lenovo drivers. I don't think you could do a workaround installing XP and waiting let's say 6 months and hope new drivers make the interaction with the docking station the correct behaviour.

I've browsing some HP business laptops, I really liked the nc8430 with the X1600 MR.

I agree. We can't expect these systems to run perfectly with Vista. I know that Vista was released 6 months ago, and technically, maybe Lenovo shouldn't release the Thinkpads with Vista, until EVERY possible bit of testing can be done....but seriously...how do you expect them to test every single thing?!?

There is a lot of pressure on these companies to get the latest and the greatest out, or else people are going to buy elsewhere. It is all about patience, for us and Lenovo too. There will be updates to the drivers and Vista that will correct any of these issues that are being posted here.

If the OP in this thread has to use Vista as a software developer, than this is a perfect learning tool. Vista isn't ready for full consumer usage. They released it, and every PC/Laptop manufacturer had to release something with it pretty quickly.

We went around and around with alot of these same issues back when XP was released....and as it stands right now....I prefer XP over Vista. But, back then, I prefered 98SE over XP..............

Install vista as a virtual machine, maybe? the T6xs are definitely powerful enough for running multiple virtual OSs. I'm currently running XP and Vista on an older desktop....on top of XP

I agree with you tfflivemb2. I think the best setup right now is dual boot using the Ultrabay 2nd hard drive adapter. I have found that if you disable the hard drive with Vista on it in Device Manager of XP, then your System Restore Points are preserved. I also set up Vista to not monitor the XP drive for System Restore (too bad you can't do that in XP).

ah yes, you could also dual boot....but why buy the ultrabay adapter thingy if you can just repartition your main HD?

shuffle2 wrote:ah yes, you could also dual boot....but why buy the ultrabay adapter thingy if you can just repartition your main HD?

Gives you peace and mind, sometimes repartitioning can go wrong.

shuffle2 wrote:ah yes, you could also dual boot....but why buy the ultrabay adapter thingy if you can just repartition your main HD?

AFAIK, you can't use System Restore in Vista if both OS's are on the same hard drive.

I have a T-60 which came loaded with XP Pro. I recently upgraded from 1 to 2 gigs of ram and than loaded Vista Busuiness.

Guess what! My fantastic T-60 turned into a pc of junk. I spent more time TRYING to use my ThinkPad, crash after crash, slow runing and lot of software that hates Vista.

After about a week, I trashed Vista and restored to my XP Pro. All is well again and mt T60 is running like a bear.

Moral to the story ! Wait about a year until all the bugs are worked out. Vista is not ready for the serious PC user. At this point in time Vista runs like Win. 95. No Good.


Just my 2 cents.

fishslayeryo wrote:Sorry to hear about all your problems. I have a beefy pc running Vista and i experience alot of issues on it.

I too just got a T61 for work yesterday. Took about a day getting everything right but I'm now been running on XP Pro with all my developement tool and all updates and core IBM sofware and drivers installed.

Personally, I hate vista. It's a pig and it's far from being stable enough for me to switch to it fulltime. I use it for it's media center on my home theatre PC, bout all it's good for in my books...and that needed ALOT of tweaking to get it rt.

Best of luck with your T61. If you can use XP i say switch. Very fast notebook on XP, flies compared to my T42p. I played with my T61 a couple hours yesterday with Vista Ultimate, it was like fat albert compared to it running on XP... fat and slow;)

Did you notice any improvement in battery life with XP versus Vista?

Looks like the $150 I spent on the dock and 25 foot dvi to hdmi wire was useless. I'm hoping that your case is isolated and might actually be a defect with your computer, but I doubt it. Fortunately, the dock isn't so necessary for me. It's more of a luxury as I was looking to have it connect to my LCD TV and to keep my keyboard and printer plugged in all the time so I wouldn't have to keep connecting and disconnecting them from my laptop.

Can anyone confirm that the same docking problems happen to them too?

I did a system update last night and noticed there were 4 updates for various components including the Intel wireless driver, access connections, and a couple of others.

Strangely, after a reboot (required when installing the updates), it took like 5 minutes for Vista to apply the updates. Very slow.

I won't know what difference it makes, if any, with docking issues until I get to the office.

One other thing to note is that when you shutdown while docked and then cold boot when NOT docked, the wireless radio does not default to "ON", so you have to remember to turn it on if your in a public wifi spot. Annoying, but not a huge issue, but unfortunately, this is my normal routine.

I normally shutdown at the office while docked, then go to the coffee shop in the morning before going to the office... I have to remember to turn on the wireless radio otherwise I just look dumb founded waiting for the wireless card to pickup the wifi signal...

jjfcpa wrote: Did you notice any improvement in battery life with XP versus Vista?

Sorry, only played with it for about 3 hours and the whole time the battery was charging with the AC adapter, so I can't speak towards the battery life. I'm sure it is longer with XP since it uses less resources.

jjfcpa wrote:The fun continues.
3. Today, a mysterious file folder (name A) appeared on my C drive and although it appears to be a virtual disk, I can actually double click on it and it will say it is currently empty. However, I can't delete it and it says that it is 150MB in size. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of it.

It is a new security feature in ThinkVantage. It allows the owner to store a small amount of information/files in a virtual drive (150MB by default). You can change the size of the drive and even disable it. It is said to be safe as the information in the drive is encrypted and the virtual drive is also protected. That is why you can't delete it in a normal way!

You think it is fun simply because you haven't got enough knowledge about your new T61.

crazyfrog wrote:

jjfcpa wrote:The fun continues.
3. Today, a mysterious file folder (name A) appeared on my C drive and although it appears to be a virtual disk, I can actually double click on it and it will say it is currently empty. However, I can't delete it and it says that it is 150MB in size. No matter what I do, I can't get rid of it.

It is a new security feature in ThinkVantage. It allows the owner to store a small amount of information/files in a virtual drive (150MB by default). You can change the size of the drive and even disable it. It is said to be safe as the information in the drive is encrypted and the virtual drive is also protected. That is why you can't delete it in a normal way!

You think it is fun simply because you haven't got enough knowledge about your new T61.

No, what's fun is that I didn't set it up and it mysteriously appeared yesterday. If I would have created it, then I'd know what it was. If you're so smart, why don't you tell me how it got there?

Now that I know what it is, I should be able to figure out how to get rid of it.

ah yes, you could also dual boot....but why buy the ultrabay adapter thingy if you can just repartition your main HD?

Dual boot is probably the best option if you need both the reliability of XP and to use Vista for certain other tasks, you can download Virtual PC 2007 free from MS, I tried it for a while and felt dual boot is way more stable for my needs.

More fun. Today when I docked it and then cold booted, I got an error after booting that br_funcs create and error and could not load. I did a Google for this file name and determined that it was part of Rescue and Recovery. I think it must have something to do with period backups that it does, because I've gotten some prompts to do a backup because it's been a while since the last one was done... actually, I've never done one.

Anyhow, I decided to go into the R&R option and disable the prompt for backups. I rebooted and that seemed to take care of it.

Note that I've never gotten this error when booting and NOT docked. So once again, I think this is related to docking.

And even more fun...

As I may have stated previously, I downloaded 4 updates last night via System Update. For some reason, my new USB keyboard (Moshi) started entering asterisks whenever I clicked in any kind of textbox or search box. It would just continue to generate asterisks and made the laptop impossible to use while docked with this keyboard plugged into a USB port on the dock.

Keep in mind that I've been using this keyboard with the dock for the last 4 days. It seemed like a key was stuck, but that didn't make sense, because it worked perfectly with my son's docked T43p.

I resorted to a different USB wireless keyboard and it worked perfectly.

Not sure what happened there, but it appears to be related to the drivers that were downloaded and the laptop being docked.