T42 2 drivers folders

[ASIS975]

hi
i have t42 (2378-rbu and i found out that i have 2 folders for drivers. i recently formated my hdd and update with thinkvantage system update 3. i think the update from ibm creates another folder for drivers and i don't no which one to keep and which one to delete and this is the reason why i have 2 folders in my document for (thinkvantage acess connections) and (acess connections) if i delete this folder it will come back very restart .

the first driver folder located in C:\DRIVERS
the second driver folder located in C:\IBMTOOLS\drivers

i am so confuse here please some one guide me to the right direction


thank you

[SteveS]

First of all, these folders do not contain the actual drivers. They contain the installers for the drivers and various utility programs for the specific ThinkPad series you have. If you are really hard up for disk space, you can delete them all.

The folders listed under IBMTOOLS\DRIVERS are the original version which were valid when the original Windows was installed on the disk – either by IBM/Lenovo, or from use of the restore CD set. The updated versions you get from the Lenovo web site get loaded into C:\DRIVERS by default. However, you can over ride this if you install them manually, rather than using System Update.

I suppose they do this as a backup. If a driver update has a serious bug, (and some of them have – especially the graphics ones), you can always down grade. The problem is that with the age of the T4x series, the original versions are generally so many revisions behind that you would not want to go back to them.

To save space and make a cleaner machine for anyone who might buy it from me, I delete all the original installers from IBMTOOLS and put the updated versions in their place. The location option appears when you run the extractor. The other thing I do is change the names of a few of the destination folders into something less cryptic. IBM selected 8 character DOS compatible names for the folders for some reason.

One note on a couple of the apps however. The WinDVD player and RecordNow that you get from the Lenovo Web site are upgrades. They will only install if they find a valid older version already installed. The folders in the IBM\TOOL\APPS folder contain the installers for the full version. Do not delete these as if you ever need to reinstall them, you can’t use upgrade installers that you download. I keep both versions in individual folders under a folder labeled “DVDPlayer” and “RecordNow” in the IBMTOOLS\APPS folder.