Help the Latest X61 Owner

[ArtShapiro]

The X61 arrived today and I've spent about four hours starting to get it functional and installing zillions of Windows and Lenovo updates, plus deleting some of the garbage bloatware.

I don't understand a couple things - can someone elucidate?

a). what in the world is the CSS that I downloaded and installed? Other than occupying an icon in the tray and popping up some messages when I log on to somewhere, I'm not sure what it's buying me.

b). I've never had a fingerprint reader before. I hoped CSS would have something to do with it, but at this point it is not apparently doing anything. What do I do to give the machine the proverbial finger, instead of typing in passwords? I even put non-blank passwords on the two login accounts under the expectation that the fingerprint reader would ultimately take care of them.

Oh yeah - first runin with Vista Home Basic (I have Ultimate on my T42). Where in Arthur's name is the Administrator account? Even from safe mode with two CTRL-ALT-DELETEs, it doesn't seem to pop up. I'd like to give it a non-blank password. As I type this, I vaguely remember having to do a registry hack to get to it on Ultimate, but I'll still leave this paragraph in my posting.

Art

[smvp6459]

Administrator password:

Right click the computer icon on your desktop, select manage, select local users and groups, select users, right click administrator, click set password.

[ArtShapiro]

Right click the computer icon on your desktop, select manage, select local users and groups, select users, right click administrator, click set password.

Gee, to my surprise that seems to be absent from Home Basic, and even trying the usual run of CONTROL USERPASSWORDS2 gives you "sorry, not in Home Basic" for any of the Advanced operations!

I can see my relationship with Vista Home Basic is not likely to be a prolonged one!

Art

[smvp6459]

Wow. Even worse than XP Home. I'm glad I got Vista Business.

[mgo]

a). what in the world is the CSS that I downloaded and installed? Other than occupying an icon in the tray and popping up some messages when I log on to somewhere, I'm not sure what it's buying me.

b). I've never had a fingerprint reader before. What do I do to give the machine the proverbial finger, instead of typing in passwords?
Art

CSS is "Client Security Solution" which is a rather convoluted password manager. I dumped mine quick as soon as I saw how bad it was. You can easily uninstall it in Add/Remove

Fingerprint reader is a separate application somewhere in Thinkvantage in Programs. You will "enroll" your fingerprints and then those prints will be sent to a chip on the motherboard. If you like you can then set a power on password and hard drive password out of the BIOS settings and the fingerprint reader will respond to those if you opt for it. Fingerprint reader works reasonably well, unless it's having a bad hair day and then you might need to swipe a couple of times. If it still balks, you just type in the password, which is a rare occurance.

Yep, good old Vista Home Basic, aka "watered down lawsuit bait" Vista. It's not hopeless, but you will need some 3rd party apps for movies and things as I remember. I run Vista in Classic mode for improved speed and simplicity.