Lenovo N100 - USB & Sound Card Issues, Whats the deal?

[scottiedog]

Hey All,

So I have had my N100 0768-A52 laptop for a number of months now. Initially the laptop came pre-installed with Vista which was no good for me so I installed Windows XP Professional. Now, I did delete the recovery partition, but hey, I have been building computers for years, no big deal to get the drivers......wow was I wrong!

Sound card was the first problem, I installed the drivers from the Lenovo site, specific to my laptop, but these were wrong (SoundMax), my laptop has a realtek sound card. So I dug and dug around, the standard Realtek drivers were causing problems then i found a similar Lenovo N100 series laptop and installed its Realtek drivers. Success, sound! However, now my microphone no longer works and if I plug my head phones in the internal speakers will not shutoff. I checked my configuration in the Realtek control panel, "Mute rear speakers when headphones are plugged in", also messed around with enabling and disabling the SPDIF output (I heard somewhere this works). No change, no mic and the rear speakers are on constantly.

Next problem, USB, every time I plug something in everything works until I hit a key on the keyboard and the USB device is disconnected, if I stop typing the device is reconnected. Any idea's?

Its driving me a little crazy, always loved IBM laptops, my T20 was an amazing machine. Apart from the above problems this Lenovo would be great, but if I can't figure it out I will have to purchase something else

Thanks for your help!

[Harryc]

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

[Kyocera]

Hi, scottiedog, did you check out this link prior to moving back to XP....... and also make some recovery CDs?

I was thinking about doing a clean install of XP on my v200 but have not been real comfortable with the drivers that are available.

[ryengineer]

Clean install can be menace at times. If I were in your situation I would be taking advantage of Downgrade rights (of Microsoft) from lenovo which the previous poster Kyocera has suggested to you.

[scottiedog]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. I tried the ThinkVantage system update, it attempts to install the incorrect driver for my soundcard. I also tried a BIOS update, at the point of writing the image to the BIOS I get a blue screen and the system restarts. I then installed a fresh clean copy of Windows XP Pro and it still did the same thing.

Strange thing is, reading on a number of forums this happens a lot with this model of laptop (3000 N100). I cannot understand why IBM/Lenovo force you to use there copy of Vista or supply you (for a fee) with downgrade CD's. The situation is our office is covered under a MS license, so whatever we purchase it has to be formatted and installed with our own copies. I didn't make recovery CD's, another strange point, why are no CD's supplied?

Thinking at the end of the day its just down to very poor driver support by Lenovo/IBM, major pain, looks like I am throwing in the towel and purchasing a Dell.

Thanks again

[andyP]

I haven't played around alot with the 3000 series, but, if you copy the folder C:\SWTOOLS before formating you will probably have all the drivers you need. (works with TPs).

Another method, if you don't need to make a clean install is to use, (should they happen to be lying around), TP recovery cds from a TP that has similar components.
p.s. I didn't write that

[Kyocera]

FTR, I installed a vanilla copy of XP pro on my V200 and so far (with the drivers that are available) it is working OK. Battery life is about 30 to 40% better. I keep looking at the battery icon in disbelief. I'm sure i'll run into some minor issue but after using Vista for a while now, on this and other machines, i'm slowly ditching Vista altogether.