T500 Upgrade to W7, Almost Finished.

[BobHelms]

Hello;
My 1st post here. I have upgraded a T500 from Vista Ultimate 32-bit to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I didn't know when I placed the machine order that Lenovo wouldn't ship both 32 and 64 bit upgrade media as part of the FREE W7 upgrade deal, shame on me. So I purchased a decent priced retail upgrade off the 'bay' and did a clean install of W7 Professional 64-bit, worked like a charm. I've used what I believed to be "THE OFFICIAL" T500 Lenovo driver matrix (MIGR-70443) to complete the install. Most features of the T500 work but there is one I can't get to work correctly, the 15.4" WSXGA + TFT display. Lenovo refers to it as 44C1924. Now since I've used 'Non-Lenovo' upgrade media for my upgrade there is no support, period. So I'm hoping to find help here so I can resolve my two outstanding issues.

1. My OSD for 'Brightness Setting' won't display / work. However OSD for 'Speaker Volume' does work.
2. Control Panel > Power Options > Change Plan Settings >changes to 'Change Advanced Power Settings' for 'Display Brightness' are not retained after system restart.

I'm pretty sure #1 is finding and installing the correct driver but I not sure which driver that is. The Lenovo matix has been wrong once already (modem driver) and the one they do list (and I installed) ain't working. In addition I ran SYSTEMUPDATE40 (MIGR-73695), it was no help with the OSD issue. As for #2 I've googled for over a week now and I haven't found anything that looked promising. So for the time being I have to turn down the display brightness manually every time I boot. That's not a show stopper but it is a PITA. TIA for any information or help provided.
Bob Helms
R40 2681-28U XP-Pro SP2
R51 1830-AKU XP-Pro SP2
R51 1836-H7U XP-Pro SP2
T500 2242-CTO W7 Pro 64

[tedrogers]

I have this same problem. No brightness OSD.

Everything else is okay, i.e. Volume, Light etc

Uninstalled and reinstalled Lenovo Fn OSD driver (Hotkey Features Setup), but no change.

Anyone got an idea about a proper solution to this? I don't fancy hacking my registry like in some other posts.

Thanks.

[zhenya]

See this thread.

[tedrogers]

See this thread.

Hi,

Thanks for this, but does installing in a specific order as mentioned work? And why would it work? I'm dubious because surely there is something fundamentally wrong with the software / drivers.

Thank you.

[zhenya]

Yes, it should work. I have installed in the past without regard to order and had things like my OSD not work. Installing in the correct order is crucial to getting everything working properly. Even so, as I've mentioned many times here, I have never, having done this numerous times on different machines, been able to get the Power Manager to work 100% when installing from a Retail disc.

I don't believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the drivers - there is a lot of low level stuff going on here and all systems have dependencies that can potentially cause issues like this.

[tedrogers]

It's just annoying as heck.

I've tried over and over tonight to get the OSD working fully, and to no avail.

I've tried all sorts of order and systems to uninstalling and installing again.

I gave up on the Lenovo fingerprint reader, and so instead use the Win 7 native support which is nice actually.

I might just sack this OSD off....I like without it in Ubuntu...and that's my main OS anyway. Would be good to have a fully working system though.

I don't get why it worked fine in Vista Business (the native OS of the T500) and yet Win 7 is problematic. Grrrr.

[zhenya]

Was Vista installed from a Retail disk or from the factory or a factory disc?

[tedrogers]

It was preloaded on the machine.

I made a backup of all the Vista partitions (PRELOAD, SWTOOL etc) before I removed vista to put XP on and then Win 7, so if I rebuild the partitions to exactly how they were before I can go back to Vista.....but it's a lot of work.

Why do you ask?

[zhenya]

Well, the fact that it was preloaded is why it worked. Lenovo factory images work fine. It's manual installs that are a pain.

[tedrogers]

Hmmm...this is not good.

I bought Lenovo because I trusted the reliability and rugged build quality.

This is disheartening.

Maybe they will issue a fix.

Fingers crossed.