Any owner of a ThinkPad (or any notebook, for that matter) has faced the following dilemma: you want to reinstall Windows, but don’t want to deal with the hassle that reinstalling the huge amount of drivers and utilities that make the ThinkPad experience complete: skip the drivers, none of your devices will work; miss the utilities, none of IBM’s ThinkVantage features will work. And once you have them installed, it’s a hassle to keep them up to date.
Well, your life has just gotten a lot easier. IBM recently introduced the IBM ThinkPad Software Installer, which is a small utility (~857 KB) that you install on a network connected ThinkPad — which means you will need to first install a driver for a network device, but that’s relatively simple. The program takes your ThinkPad’s configuration, sends it to IBM’s site, and gets back a list of every driver, firmware update and software upgrade that your system needs. Tell it to go to it, and in a few minutes (depending of course on network speed, system speed), you’ll have a completely functional ThinkPad!
The best thing? It works with just about every ThinkPad out there (see the site for a complete list), so those of us who use older ThinkPads in various support roles are not left out of the automatically-downloaded goodness.
i have 3 thinkpads a love them all. But…………I purchased one used and went to site, downloaded the updates and all went well….then it asked to reboot and its been locked tight ever since. ibm tech support suggest i replace motnerboard cause the password from who knows when got activated by the download.
any suggestions??????????????
tony
You can usually reset MB passwords by removing the battery from the motherboard and disconnecting the PC from any power. Occasionally there’s a jumper involved as well. The procedure should be fully documented for your PC, and even though it may seem like a hassle, if they’re going to have you replace the motherboard you might as well try this first.
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