System Update 4.0

This is potentially a really dumb question, but it's following a pretty dumb move...Long story short, I wiped out my Win7 partition, and I now need to install a clean copy. Not even the factory image. I do have a Win7 key lying around, so that's not a big deal. However, I don't want to bother installing drivers and whatnot. I'm wondering if System Update will do this job for me. If I install System Update, will it find and install PM and tponscr, etc. for me?

 

Yes, definitely.

//anyway, System Update is not always available. The night I got this laptop, the server was down so I couldn't use System Update. The next day, it worked fine.

 

Are you serious? That's phenomenal. I am no longer afraid to clean install Win7...Forget Rescue and Recovery Are there any caveats that I should watch out for?

 

Yes, I'm serious. System Update is one of advantages Thinkpads give to you .

As I said, System Update is not 100% available. Downtime is rare, but if it fails, so just be patient and try again later. Otherwise, you should spend time to have a look at list and decide which drivers/utilities to download and install.

 

Just to be on the safe side I usually download at least the ethernet or the wifi drivers to a flash drive before doing a clean install of Windows. Win 7 has support for most Thinkpad cards but I like to make sure that I'll be online right away afterwords no matter what

 

I can't remember if the Gigabit ethernet couldn't be found a vanilla install of Windows 7. I want to say it didn't have a driver for it. I know for sure the WiFi driver wasn't included.

I recall having to stick the latest gigabit ethernet driver onto a flash drive before I could download any other drivers ( I installed the Enterprise x64 version). Once you do that, you should be able to download System Update and do the rest.