How to speed up your Lenovo X41T

[Hammerhead]

Mark, this is awesome. Thanks so much! Too bad you didn't make a Ghost image of your implementation for other owners of the 18666SU. Does your implementation here still support the IBM service partition?

I just got my X41 in December, and don't seem to experience the delays you speak of, but then again, I have 1.5G, no drive cache, and spent a fair amount of time twaddling with msconfig to stop unnecessary services from loading. Still, I'm seriously thinking about doing this, if I can find the time, and a window of opportunity when I don't need to rely on the machine.

[k0lo]

Hammerhead:

Thanks for the encouragement. No, I decided to nuke the IBM service partition and instead use an Acronis True Image partition for backups and recovery.

I have 1 GB of RAM in this machine, and so do most of my co-workers with X41Ts, and their machines (a few weeks old) are really slow like mine used to be.

P.S. -- On a topic near and dear to your heart, PlanPlus is gone, gone, gone now and it isn't coming back!

[herzinger]

quote:Originally posted by k0lo

Part III

17. More importantly, you need to consider which drivers and programs to NOT install. Here are the ones that I passed on, with a few words of explanation. Again, make your own choices.[list][*] ThinkVantage Technology - System Migration Assistant (maybe this would help in moving this new image to another PC, but not needed now)[*] IBM ThinkPad Power Manager -- This is a nifty utility that allows more control over the machine's power states than Windows, but it has a fatal flaw. In order for it to automatically switch between your power profiles, the great-big honking battery symbol must be displayed in the taskbar. On this little screen, that's a waste of space when there's so little screen real estate available. And it's two more processes to load at startup. No thanks. Windows can manage the power profiles acceptably well, with the same great battery life as the IBM Power Manager.

I found a way to use IBM ThinkPad Power Manager without the big battery symbol.

1. Click on the battery symbol and Launch Power Manager...
2. Click the Options... button
3. Uncheck "Show Power Manager Gauge in task bar"

As far as I can tell, Power Manager is still running. You can access it through Control Panel|Power Options to make changes.

Thanks for your valuable posts Mark.

[Hammerhead]

Mark, how would you go about it if you wanted to preserve the IBM service partition? They have a handful of diagnostic utilities that are pretty good, and particularly useful if ever you needed service, they wouldn't support the reconfiguration. So, I'd be inclined to preserve the OEM arrangement, but just 'flush' all the other crapola.

[k0lo]

herzinger:

You're correct; you can disable the display of the Power Manager Gauge in the task bar. However, the power manager won't switch power profile settings automatically when the gauge is hidden.

For example, if you set up a power profile that puts the screen to full brightness when on AC and to half brightness when on battery, when you plug and unplug your AC adapter you can see the screen brightness change between the two settings that you specified in the profile (the green on-screen bargraph pops up to confirm the setting) only when the battery gauge is displayed. If you hide the battery gauge, the display brightness won't automatically change when you plug and unplug the AC adapter. Maybe this is a bug in Power Manager?

[k0lo]

Hammerhead:

That's something that I'd like to know more about. The service partition contains Windows PE and PC-Doctor for DOS, which are very helpful for troubleshooting. I kept an image of the partition in case I decide to put it back some day.

You can certainly tell Windows to keep the Service Partition intact and install only in the existing Windows partition when you do the clean install, but I'm pretty sure that XP installs its own bootloader, thus over-writing the IBM bootloader that allows you to boot into the service partition. You'd then have to figure out how to fix this.

I suppose you could install a Linux bootloader like lilo or grub, but I'm not sure how you'd hook into the blue "Access IBM" button so that you would keep that function working. I was hoping that someone who knows how to do this would chime in and tell us.

One of the things that I'm going to do is to install PC-Doctor for DOS on a bootable USB stick. Even if your hard drive died you'd be able to do some basic troubleshooting that way.

[Hammerhead]

Hmmm... is it possible to image the boot sector itself, install TabletXP in the main visible partition, reinstall the original boot sector, and and leave the service partition alone? If so, what would you use to do so? Maybe something like DriveImage?

[Mindfull1]

Thank You Mark, for this amazing read.. It's a work of art & dedication. For those of us w/o XP on Disk (the non-industry folks, I guess!), we can either watch on or tap the shoulder of someone with a Disk for hire/share. I'm very intrigued by the gains in speed, and hope to do this over a convenient break from work.

That said, I also agree with those who mentioned regular registry sweeps & clean up from botched installs. I've been generally pleased with the speed of the X41, but maybe that's cause I'd already expected it to be slow from reading here! I've got 1.5Gb RAM with the MS Patch for Hibernate. No problems at all with Hibernate, Standby, Recovery or Reboot until an HP all-in-one failed to install correctly. Now that brings about a 10-15 sec delay to startup & restore from hibernate. I'll try to hit it with the Reg Sweeper tonight, but that's just an example of the little things that contribute to slowness becoming a problem. So many people assume either "bad system" or "virus! spyware!" when it is often a driver conflict or failed install. Just a thought. Please keep us posted, all of you who reinstall- Very curious for your results as well!

[bmhome1]

In my enthusiastic endorsement for registry cleaning to help maintain OS speed, I failed to mention two important points about registry cleaning in general.

First, its fairly logical to assume that registry cleaning should have curative powers for major OS problems also. I believe the opposite is true, the better the OS health, the safer running a registry cleaner will be. Its not a panacea but rather a tool for optimizing an already smooth running OS. I think the bad rep registry cleaners get comes from those desperate for a cure with a major problem, only to have the last resort of the cleaner run to be the final blow for BSOD requiring a full reinstall. Just as running defragmentation on a problematic OS would be an unwise option.

Secondly, I would only advocate registry cleaning at all for a fully backed up OS and all data. For the price of Acronis True Image ($35 online) and a USB2 external drive and a few minutes time (my 12GB OS takes 9 minutes to create drive image) there's no reason to risk major disaster without such simple and commonsense insurance. I've never had a single issue running registry cleaning regularly, but I have zero risk doing them having recent drive images always available. I can wipe and reinstall in less than a hour as total safety net protection.

Lastly, I have only experience with relatively expensive PCTool's Registry Mechanic, which has been 100% solid. Some rely on JV-16 with positive results also. But there's many dozens of others around, including freewares that may or may not be as well supported and updated.

The registry may only be an enormous ever-growing "hive" of tiny data entries, but an erroneous deletion of just one can be disasterous. Clearing out thousands of the truly dead ones has helped maintain speed and stability, but unrelenting caution and knowing the huge risks should always rule choosing to do it.

[eringatang]

I have some questions about the beggining of this produre:

1) My c:\ root drive does not have the folders "DOCS" and "VALUEADD". Can I use these folders off of the XP Disk?

2) On the WinXP disk, there are two folders $OEM$ and DOCSNETFX that you don't mention. I assume I don't need the OEM folder, b/c it is full of dell-related stuff, but what about the DOCSNETFX folder? Do I need it?

3) The WINXP disk had the files WIN51IC (WIN51IC.SP2) instead of WIN51IP -- same difference, right?

4) The file wpa.dbl was not on the WinXP disk. Do I need to find this somewhere else?

Thank you for your help and also for this great thread.
Erin