How to speed up your Lenovo X41T

[Defiant]

Whoops, switch drivers and updates in the last reply :)

[Jimmer]

It has been a week now since I did the clean install. The machine is still extremely quick compared to original. More importantly it is far more stable than it ever was. Which, funny enough, is why I always buy IBM's. Sadly, I do not understand why vendors insist on filling thier base image full of garbage apps. Regarless, the general performance is fantastic and I certinaly encourage anyone who buys an X41T to consider doing this right our of the box.

Talked to my Lenove rep this week. Told him about the clean install and wiping the service partition. He was surprized how much improvement there was and is going to have a peek at my machine during his next visit. On a seperate note, apparantly there is a driver fix for the streaking cursor on the horizon. I am still dealing with that on an intermittent basis which is a major frustration when it starts up in a lecture. However, that is a topic of a seperate thread.

James

[moneyburninghole]

As described above, got BartPE booting of the USB drive. Using that I was able to reformat the X41's harddrive (using diskpart to wipe out the service part, format to format as ntfs). Then, I copied all installation files to the X41's harddrive from the USB stick.

cd'd into c:i386 an ran winnt32.exe (because I'm in BartPE, not DOS). That seemed to work OK, it asked me for the Key, etc. and then started copying installation files. Once the copying was done, however, the setup just quit. So I'm stuck . . .

Still trying, though.

Oh, wait a minute, I just rebooted and now XP setup started automatically off the USB drive. and seems to be working. fingers crossed . . .

EDIT: Still not exactly working. It installed a WINDOWS part on the X41, but is still only booting off the USB.

[moneyburninghole]

Think I got it. Transferred BartPE to the X41, installed from there. I'll post full details later.

[moneyburninghole]

OK. Here's what I did. Obviously, use at your own risk.

1. Use PEBuilder to Create BartPE. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/. If you're creating from an SP2 CD, make sure you enable the RpcSS plugin, otherwise you won't be able to run DiskPart. I also suggest the A43 File Management plugin, though its not strictly necessary (it's in by default). Check 'None' for media output.

2. Use PEToUSB to format your USB drive for booting and copy your newly built copy of BartPE to your USB drive. http://gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb NB: This app is not the same as the PE2USB app included with BartPE.

3. Open your USB Drive in Windows and copy over all the TabletPC installation files, i.e., I386, CMPNENTS, etc... Make sure you get Setup.exe from your Windows XP CD.

4. Boot your X41 from the USB Drive. Press F12 during bootup and it will allow you to select the USB Drive. BartPE should boot.

5. From BartPE, use Format to format your X41's partition as NTFS. You can also use DiskPart to wipe out your service partition (this is what I did). THESE TOOLS WILL WIPE YOUR HARDDRIVE. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

6. After your X41's partition is setup as desired. Copy all the contents of your USB drive over to that partition. (This is where the A43 File Manager is useful, but xcopy works as well).

7. Reboot. The system should boot off the harddrive and now you're done with the USB drive.

8. From BartPE, which is now loaded off the harddrive, navigate to X:I386 (the harddrive is designated X: by BartPE, that will change when you install windows), and run Setup.exe.

9. Follow the directions. At some point you'll reboot, and also have to manually point the installer to the TabletPC components, but all should work fine.

10. After you boot into Windows post-install, you can delete all the BartPE residual files, i.e., Programs, minint, etc . . . DON'T DELETE YOUR NTLDR or anything like that. I moved my install folders into a folder called INSTALL, but do what you like there.

11. You should be set. I had to manually update my ethernet driver (which you did put on your disk, right?!?), but after that could activiate windows, etc, etc.

Have fun! And, again, don't do this if you don't know what you're doing. :-)

So far this seems to work. Haven't yet run into any oddities from installing this way.

Oh, and as someone previously pointed out, you could do all this using DOS, and not BartPE, but then you'll have a Fat32 volume.

[k0lo]

moneyburninghole:

It sounds like it was a lot of work to get to where you're at! There's one thing that I don't understand. If it's so effortless to install Windows XP from a CD, why can't you make a USB memory key emulate a CD drive and get the same result? I've read dozens of articles and haven't yet figured that one out, other than it's currently a much-wanted feature that Microsoft and others are working the bugs out of.

When you get your apps installed and everything working, please post your results. Did the clean install make a difference on your machine? How much of a difference?

[moneyburninghole]

yes. it was some work. on the plus side, i got pretty familiar with bartpe and the windows boot process (though there's still a lot of mystery on the latter front).

so far things seem great on the laptop. much much faster. i had to manually install the intel security chip driver from lenovo's site, for some reason software install didn't pull it.

also, i can confirm that the client security software causes a big hit on bootup, but i like its features, so i'm keeping it for now.

[bakdai]

I did a reinstall. Things seem to be going great. However, my sound buttons don't work.....any way to fix this? What am I missing?

[k0lo]

It's probably one of the following IBM drivers:

IBM ThinkPad Tablet Button Driver
Fn On-Screen Display

[bakdai]

Yeah that was it. On screen display fixed the problem. Thanks. Things fun faster now. I guess my only complaint is that without install the power manager, I don't see how I can maintain the extra brightness my screen has when I'm plugged in. Is there a way to do this without that? I can live without it for the most part.