.mrt memo

Here are some thoughts for the users of Lenovo ThinkPads with XP.

There is quite a lot of bloatware (or is it crapware, I keep mixing those up) preinstalled on your Thinkpad and the easiest way to get rid of it is to do a custom factory install/recovery from your ThinkVantage boot menu. You can install Windows from the maintenance partition with some additional utilities. The good aspect of it is, that you can choose which crapware to install. I was tempted to not install anything, but then the software is already there, why not try to learn if some of it is actually useful.

So the hardware is Lenovo ThinkPad T60 2007FVG, a nice laptop with 15” screen, fingerprint reader, 3 USB ports, three additional volume control buttons, one PCMCIA slot and one ExpressCard slot (PCI-express in PCMCIA sized hole). So let’s take a look at software available.

Useful apps

• PC-Doctor for Windows – an utility to diagnose hardware problems. It has loads of tests. I guess if you’d run it regularly, you could prevent your harddrive from dying of such.
• Presentation Director – Fn+F7, an utility to manage your video configuration
• Productivity Center Supplement for ThinkPad – part of the menu you can conjure in Windows with the blue ThinkVantage button, I consider it quite useful sometimes, so I don’t want to lose the extra options there
• ThinkVantage Access Connections – Fn+F5 – your little networking manager, much better then XP default,
• ThinkVantage Productivity Center – well, it’s the menu under blue ThinkVantage button, so if you use it, then it’s probably a good thing to have.
• WINXP – ILA Update – TVSU2 – seems somekind of update to XP, probably better to have it, but didn’t really find anything useful on that one on the net.

Other crap

• Access Help
• Acrobat Reader – probably an old version so why bother installing it
• Away Manager 2.0 – got no idea why is this useful, seems some resource management tool. Only time seen it in use is when you go from Productivity Center to “Maintenance – Run task”, then the Windows defrag utility is used to run in the Away Manager.
• Diskeeper Lite – freeware utility to defragment your hard drive. Maybe it defrags your HDD a bit faster, otherwise I wouldn’t really see the usefulness in that. And the funny thing is that if you select “Maintenance – Run Task Now” from the Productivity Center (TV blue button), then it uses Windows’ own defrag utility. Go figure.
• Google Picasa – some old version
• Help Center for ThinkPad – another help something
• Message Center for ThinkPad – the thing that keeps annoying you every once in awhile with some stupid messages, nothing useful
• Microsoft Windows Live Toolbar – if I need my browser window to be smaller, then I just resize it, not install some stupid toolbars
• SUN JRE 1.5.0.06 – some old Java
• Symantec Client Security – probably some lame-ass trialware
• Symantec Client Security Virus Definitions – some more crapware to be replaced by AVG or such free antivirus
• System Migration Assistant – some ThinkVantage enterprise bloatware, probably more complicated and annoying “user files copying system”
• ThinkPad EasyEject Utility – Fn+F9 – one helluva stupid utility. It somewhat duplicates the windows “safely remove hardware” utility, but it doesn’t show you the drive letter or name what you’re about to disconnect. So if you have 2 USB sticks, you can choose to remove an “USB mass storage device” or an “USB mass storage device”. “Chance favors the prepared mind”?
• ThinkVantage System Update – been using the laptop for over a year and haven’t seen any Lenovo updates. Maybe it’s something to do with enterprise Lenovo environment, so it would definately go under the “crap” category
• TVT Welcome Message Applet – you have got to be kidding me
• Wallpaper 2005 (world map) – I guess it’s one of those ThinkPad trademark things.
• XP Themes 2005 – LC – no thanks

Haven’t got a clue

.. so I’m not going to install them.

• RnR – Enhanced Diagnostic
• RnR – Enhanced Diagnostics Diskette Image
• ThinkPad Configuration
• ThinkPad Configuration Data I
• ThinkPad Configuration for DOS (Command Prompt)

After all that, found this presentation about ThinkVantage Technologies, that has many familiar buzzwords in there, but didn’t really help that much.

PS

Some final suggestions – “ThinkVantage – Update my system” is a good idea. They are trying to do something like the usual Linux online package repositories, but with Lenovo software. There are couple of additional third party software too like Flash plugin, Diskeeper and such, but who installs software like that in Windows. In Linux you might set up your whole system with apt-get oneliner, but in Windows you are supposed to work and feel the pain. You can use my list of freeware on Windows to get started with setting up your Win.

Enjoy!