T500: Lenovo dropped the ball on this launch <rant>

[cdclark]

Let me start off by saying that I have always enjoyed managing and deploying Thinkpads, and have been buying them in my <100 person company since the T41 days.

Recently it became apparent that we'd be adding more traveling staff so I started looking at a new standard notebook for these guys. Now I don't buy a lot of portable machines per year, maybe 10 at most, but I like to do everything I can to keep people on similar hardware so I can maintain fewer images. I decided to hold off on my purchases for a month or so when I saw that the T500 was announced.

Fast forward to this week. I called up my rep at CDW and ordered when I saw it on the website. Got it the next day but it sat at my desk for another couple days while I dealt with other issues. On Thursday I opened it up and booted it for the first time. Overall, I would personally prefer a smaller machine but these guys do CAD and need the screen real estate, so I'm planning to standardize on the T500. This particular one is a 2242-35U (my bad, I should have ordered the better display but this was in stock).

After letting it boot and testing a few things it was time to blast out the OEM XP bloat load and install a clean OS and build my corporate image. An hour later it was formatted and had a clean XP load. This is where the fun begins. I went to the lenovo support site to grab the Network driver, after which I would load the Thinkvantage Software Update. Guess what, they only have the Vista network driver on the site, even when the machine arrived with XP on it.

After an hour on the phone with Thinkpad support the guy eventually helped me figure out what gigabit chipset (Hint: Its listed in the description of the Vista driver download page) it was and I found some drivers on the Intel site. The support guy was very apologetic and offered to send me free restore CDs, but those are useless to me once I get my custom image set up. He was somewhat surprised and appalled at the lack of information and drivers available for this machine.

So with a finally working network I got down to trying to get the OTHER 11 non-working devices in the device manager to work. I loaded .NET 2.0 and Thinkvantage Software Update, but it did not manage to find any more XP drivers than are on the website. This is beyond annoying and frustrating, especially since I considered making an image of the factory load prior to blasting it but decided not to. So now, I wait.

</rant>

[SHoTTa35]

well i thought XP wasn't so "supported" on these machines and you can only get it with the recovery CD option.

Since you've been buying for a while too you should also know that the drivers are NEVER available right away for anything (this included the T61 drivers for XP or Vista). The drivers for those usually come a tad later.

[cdclark]

well i thought XP wasn't so "supported" on these machines and you can only get it with the recovery CD option.

Since you've been buying for a while too you should also know that the drivers are NEVER available right away for anything (this included the T61 drivers for XP or Vista). The drivers for those usually come a tad later.

In the past I've always bought mid-cycle or later and everything is available at that point, so this is new to me.

If the OS comes on the thing, the drivers should be available too. According to the Thinkpad support tech the drivers would not necessarily be on the recovery disk in an extractable and installable fashion.

[carbon_unit]

Since you have been doing this with IBM's for a while I would think you would have grabbed the IBMTOOLS folder from the C:/ drive before wiping the preload. I know you expect to be able to download drivers from the net but it is so much easier to have a folder full of drivers on a USB drive.

When the drivers are right there in front of you, back 'em up before you smoke 'em.

[cdclark]

Yeah.. noted for next time. As I mentioned above I considered taking an image of the preload but opted not to.

Any chance of getting this stuff from the utility partition? I left that intact.

[dr_st]

Sure, restore the preloaded OS from the utility partition, then copy the drivers, and then wipe it again and install the new OS.

[wswartzendruber]

Are you, by any chance, still missing anything?

[cdclark]

Sure, restore the preloaded OS from the utility partition, then copy the drivers, and then wipe it again and install the new OS.

Alright, in that case I'll do a variation of that on Monday:

• -Take image of what I have now (my clean install w/ all updates and patches), sans a dozen drivers.
  -Restore factory load from utility partition
  -Take image of new factory preload partition
  -Copy drivers folder via Ghost console from preload image into my clean image
  -Restore my clean XP image

[jdhurst]

All that, and in my opinion, it is generally faster to take the PreLoad and uninstall the things you don't want. There are a great many drivers including some you don't see, so building clean and finding it all takes longer and leaves you the problems you have. Sigh!!
... JDH

[carbon_unit]

When reinstalling the preload you should be able to do a selective restore thereby eliminating the parts you do not want but getting the benefits of the parts you do want being properly integrated.
Also Windows will be using the VLK number allowing you to clone it onto all your other units without having to reseal the build before cloning. That should make your job a little easier.

[bill bolton]

it was time to blast out the OEM XP bloat load and install a clean OS and build my corporate image.

[snip]

This is beyond annoying and frustrating, especially since I considered making an image of the factory load prior to blasting it but decided not to.

Rants about self inflicted injuries are pointless!

[agarza]

You could have looked in the SWSETUP directory and backup all the XP drivers for your T500.