New T420

I just received my new eBay T420 and it's very clean. Like new, pretty much. I paid $330 with free shipping. It came from a PC repair facility in Florida It's always a crapshoot on eBay but it appears I continue to have good luck.

I've got a couple things I can't figure out.

1. There is no driver installed for the SM Bus Controller.

2. There are no ThinkVantage tools installed, such as I have on the T400.

The OS is a MS-validated install of Win 7 Ultimate. I spent most of the day downloading and installing almost 200 updates . . . I still don't know if I've got SP1 or not, much less SP2.

It's got 8 GB of RAM, don't know what kind yet. The processor is a 64 bit i5 going 2.5 gigahertz. BIOS is 1.42.

The HD is an OCZ-Vertex3 ATA of 111.79 GB. Looks as if it's an SSD but I'm not seeing any particular system speed from having one . . . battery consumption is noticeably good however. I think the bus controller driver problem is plugging things up. It's not slooww . . . it's just not any faster than my T400, maybe even a little slower. The T400 has a Centrino and a regular Barracuda 320 drive and it's all plenty fast for my needs, but no speed demon.

The T400 still runs fine but I've been wanting a back-up notebook for awhile and so have gone in search of a newer T series Thinkpad. I can't live without my Thinklight. Plastic on the T400 has seriously gone downhill (cracks) just with normal use, but nothing that affects function. The wifi radio went out not long after I got it and despite putting two new ones in, none of them work. Someone mentioned along the way there was a radio/motherboard problem with some of the T400's. Looks like I got one of those. I use plug-in Ethernet mostly and a USB wifi connector when I need wireless.

One nice thing . . . the new one is free of crapware. It appears to be a nice clean OS install.

I don't know which screen panel I've got but it appears very clear and free from anomalies like I've read about on the board. Colors are not very vivid, but that may improve with newer drivers or other tweaking.

It would be much faster to get to the bottom of understanding where I'm at with drivers and components if I had the Lenovo tools on board. I went to the Lenovo site but didn't find a way to download the ThinkVantage suite. Without the Power Manager I won't be able to set battery thresholds. The only function of the blue ThinkVantage button appears to be to interrupt the boot and take one to the BIOS screen.

This machine is still under a three year warranty, I find in looking it up. I wonder what happened to the original software that it came with . . . .

I did a search through the forums but didn't come up with answers to these two querys, although I sure got sidetracked into other directions. There's nothing like getting a new computer to lose all track of time and space.

Thanks for any pointers on the bus issue and the ThinkVantage tools issue,

Mike


I'm having trouble on this board making changes to my signature. I want to reduce the size of the T400 signature and add
T420 4180-A34
whenever the system decides it's safe enough to let me do it.

 

The chipset driver will install the SMBus

You can install System Update and it will install updates if you like, but you won't have the recovery partitions because it looks like it's been wiped.

You might want to try installing the Intel Rapid Driver to see if that makes things more snappy.

 

If you really want the software that came with the machine, you should be able to call Lenovo Support and tell them the hard drive crashed and your Lenovo Rescue and Recovery DVD disk set doesn't work. I think they'll send you a disk set that matches the original image that came on the machine. There might be a nominal cost.