software installer, new computer

[thesyst3m]

i have a t43 and when i clicked the red "software installer" button on internet explorer, it told me i had about 500mb of stuff to download. is this common? i bought my thinkpad about a month ago and some of the "updated software" is from 2004 and stuff...

what should i do?

[christopher_wolf]

Update?

Many updates could have come out after the Thinkpad was shipped from the factory. It varies depending on the manufcaturing date; the worst case scenario is when it ships *just* before a large release of updates.

In any case, if you are uncomfotable with updating in such a huge leap; you can make an on-disk backup of your system and prodeed in more managible chunks of install packages. HTH

[thesyst3m]

well, i downloaded it all when iwent out. however, i tried to install them and the IE error message comes up, and everything closes. what is the problem?

[christopher_wolf]

Well, I would recommend running the Software Installer as a standalone application; I wouldn't fully trust IE with a 500MB+ Download of system update packages.

Try it with the Software Installer by itself and see how it goes.

[davidspalding]

I just got handed a T41 at work, apparently rebuilt from the original ship image and with tons of office software installed: Office, Adobe, Robohelp, Visual Studio 2005, blah blah blah. (And yes, boy was that drive fragmented.)

I used the System Migration tool to do a pc-to-pc transfer of my files, profile, and application settings, and it worked beautifully.

Then, once logged in, I noted that most of the IBM stuff was waaaaay out of date. I downloaded the new Software Installer, installed, and ran it. It found a piddly 163 MB of updates available for BIOS, drivers and applications! I did it all ... and had to uninstall the old Battery Maximizer to install the current Power Manager (why: I don't want to deal with two paradigms on my two TPs). All said and done, and a few hours later, the 3-4 year old T41 was updated. This should NOT be the case with a new T4x, but one that's a refurb, imaged with the old drive image, could likely need some updates. I'd ensure you are on a wired, fast connection - no running update from a free Wifi hotspot at a cafe.