I've customised my new R52 my way . . .

[f1reverb]

Model 1859-28U bought factory NIB off of ebay for 760.25 with the extra chip included so 512mb ram and MS Works in the box too (as if I want it anyway). It now sports an Hitachi 7K100 80gb and 2gb ram, with all the factory loaded XP Pro and Lenovo software functioning, and the whole drive is FAT32 like I wanted it to be.

First I pulled the 40gb OEM drive and copied the contents to both another hard drive and DVD, and then parked the 40gb drive in a safe place. The factory Pre-Load (i.e. never booted drive setup) is FAT32 so no problem using MSDOS to copy things. I then took an old copy of XP Pro, installed that as a fresh copy on the 7K, and partitioned it into four 20gb partitions, and formatted only the c: drive itself. I then did a fresh install over (letting XP delete everything) the old XP with the Lenovo Pre-Load i386 directory XP Pro install, figuring that being dated 01-26-06 it would have the latest updates anyway. No problems at all this way. Once the Lenovo supplied XP Pro was installed, without all the various Thinkpad drivers and software, I then installed a wireless USB adapter and went to the Lenovo site and let it download and install all the proper software and drivers for the R52, including a BIOS update from 02-06-06. The mass download/install worked perfectly too, so other than the preloaded software like Record Now and WinDVD, I was humming with all the right drivers and IBM tools, and no wasted IBM recovery disk space. I formatted the other three logical drives as FAT32 under XP as my final step. Now I can boot into W98 MSDOS from my USB floppy and work on the files when I want to on any of the logical drives with all my MSDOS tools.

I then went to the IBM\tools\apps section of the Pre-Load 40gb files, and installed WinDVD and Record Now, as the full install of all the other apps is in that directory. I then updated both those from the Lenovo site too. Now my R52 has the factory installation completely, just minus the restore to original state partition and some of the BS apps like Norton. Who needs the recovery CDs when you have everything you need on the original drive if you never booted it, and especially if you've copied it from the Pre-Load state to another drive and DVD.

Now I do get the boot HD 2010 error message and the loud beeps, but I set the BIOS to continue with the boot. Everything functions great aside from that quirk. The display has no dead/stuck pixels, but there is a hair of a light leak at the bottom, but nothing that I didn't expect as finding a perfectly light-leak free TFT is just about impossible, although I will say that my Fry's GQ 3202 (ECS G320 in reality), just about the cheapest of all notebooks with its' VIA C3 CPU, has almost a perfect screen, but it's only about 60% of the R52s brighness level.

My R52 runs cool and does pump the heat out the vent on the left side. I was curious what temp the exhaust was, so using a non-contact IR thermometer, I measured the air coming out of the vent at 95-99 degrees fahrenheit (depending on where I aimed the IR sensor). Nice to know I can keep my Trackpoint fingertip at blood temperature whenever it gets too cold.