S3tray2.exe - what is it good for?

[skuehne]

I just noticed that my T42 load a program named 'S3tray2.exe' during startup from the $\Windows\system32\ folder. It must have come as part of the pre-installed software.

Does anyone know what this thing is good for? It looks like it is specific to S3 Savage graphics hardware. But the files are old, dating back to 2001, and I don't know of any S3 specific hardware in my T42.

I removed the entry that loads 'S3tray2.exe' from the registry. Everything seems to run fine. I'm just wondering why this stuff is part of the pre-install and what it is/was intended for.

Sven

P.S. I have a strong aversion against all these 'helper programs' - speed loaders, update schedulers, and whatever else lurks in the background, takes up memory and gets rarely if ever used ;-)

[Leon]

S3 display configuration taskbar utility for S3 chipset based graphics cards.

[K. Eng]

Yeah you can get rid of the S3tray2.exe without any problems. I have no idea why it even exists in the T4x restore image since AFAIK no T series or other IBM notebook since the T23 has used an S3 graphics chip.

[skuehne]

Thanks for confirming that this thing is completely useless. I wonder why it not only ships with current ThinkPad models but also loads at startup.

Sven

[Kenn]

Totally useless, I nuked the service the first day I got my tp.

I didn't know thinkpads used to use S3 chipsets, it's good to know there was at least some modicum of logic as to why it was there