thinkpad x41 wireless issue

[fdcobra93]

I have a Thinkpad x41 tablet, I recently had to do a hard drive factory restore. The problem I am having now is I can go to msn.com, but if I go to e-bay and put something in the search bar, and press search it will have an error message internet explorer cannot open the site operation aborted. Then if I go to a bank web site or any site that requires a password I get page cannot be displayed, on the bottom it says cannot find server or dsn error. any help would be great

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

Assuming that you ran the factory recovery operation, either via the restore partition or from CD, AND you haven't updated the operating system (XP, I again assume), then your system is woefully out-of-date. My recommendation is the following:

- If by some miracle you have a Windows XP SP3 update disk, run it. If not, I think you can still download an .ISO from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... x?id=25129 This requires that you have a CD burner and a program that can handle the .ISO format (CDBurnerXP is one such program). Oh, and a broadband connection as the image file is about 540MB and after you install the SP3 update, you'll be running...
- ...Windows Update. Keep it easy and select all of the the High Priority updates. Somewhere in the first update, you'll have to agree to the Windows Genuine Advantage package. This shouldn't be a problem if you've used the factory restore partition/disks.
- Run Windows update again (and again and again), each time choosing all of the High Priority updates. You'll probably have to do this about 7 or 8 times before your system is completely up-to-date (no more High Priority updates are offered). Which still leaves you running an unsupported OS (in the eyes of Microsoft) but that's another story.
- Install the latest Java package from https://java.com/en/download/
- Install the latest Flash package from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ Note that there's probably some security issues with Flash but there are some sites which still require its use.
- By this time, you should have Internet Explorer 8 installed. That might be good enough for most web sites. However, you can install another, more modern, browser (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc.) which will support all of the newest web technologies that have been released.
- If you still have connectivity problems, Access Connections is most likely handling the wireless connection. You could try disabling it and let Windows manage your network connections and see if that helps. If not, then maybe you might consider changing out the wireless card.

Which brings up a related question... Does the same problem occur when you connect via ethernet?

[fdcobra93]

Yes I did use the factory restore partition. I did not have a windows xp sp3 disks, or any xp disks that I know of. I did download the windows xp sp3 software on to a thumb drive and installed it that way, which took forever. After I did that I was able to install updates which it was still doing this morning. But I think it's fixed. thank you for your help. Now the other questions I had were , are there any other xp updates I should look for. I use this laptop for work looking up service manuals and such, which it works fine. should I look into updating to windows 7.
Thanks again for your help .

[rkawakami]

I don't think that I would recommend running W7 on an X41t. I'm running the factory XP Tablet 2005 install on my own system and although it works, it's fairly slow. Some of this is due to the factory (4200RPM) disk drive that's in there and some of it could be the 1.5GB memory. Maximum is supposed to be 2GB from what I understand but that's not going to make much of a difference for a 1.6Ghz Pentium M processor (I have the 1.2Ghz version).

That said, if you have the wherewithal to swap out the slow spinning drive and replace it with an SSD then maybe W7 could be usable.

[fdcobra93]

It was just a thought, xp works fine. I have 1 gb of ram in now, I was thinking of trying 2 gb to see what happens, but if it's not broke don't fix it.