T500 Shipped Today!

My laptop shipped today! I expect it by May 1st if all goes well. I am set-up and ready to accept my new computer into my house, except for a couple of things.

I will be doing a clean install within a couple of days of receiving the computer. I have all drivers downloaded for the Vista I will be install, except 2. The Chipset driver has been giving me some trouble. On the T500 driver page should I download the two drivers at the top of the page under "Intel AMT", the driver under "Windows Supplemental Downloads" named Intel Chipset, or all three? Also, for the card reader driver, is the 4-in-1 driver the intended driver for the T500?

And are there any other considerations I should have when I receive the computer? I will probably inspect it for a good 10 minutes or so to make sure it is as it should be. Any other suggestions?

Thanks. I'm very excited!

 

There are some other threads on here regarding this...but you may want to make a set of recovery disks first, before the clean install so you can put it back to factory defaults if you ever want to.

I also create a cd/dvd of the "drivers" folder and "swtools" folder on the C drive that come with the machine as those contain all of the drivers that ship with it.

 

Yeah, I would not have worried about downloading the drivers, except I'm clean installing up to 64-bit, so the drivers will switch.

 

True, but you still should do the steps outlined above. Just in case. For the cost of a DVD-R, I like to have that little piece of mind that EVERYTHING is backed up.

 

I just did a clean install for Vista Business 64bit two days ago. It took about 4hours from start to finish. What sucks about the drivers you download is some of them just expand when you run the exe into the swtools/drivers but dont actually install on the laptop. You then have to go to your device manager and look for yellow exclamations and direct it to look in the swtools/drivers folder to update the driver and install the device correctly. I saved my swtools folder before the clean install but all of the required drivers were not there. After running the executable files in the old swtools folder I still had to download many other drivers from the support page. Fingerprint drivers and others were 64 bit specific. I got mine all dialed in with some effort. Have fun.

 

So if you buy a 4 gb RAM they don't install the 64 bit for you?

 

When you customize, you can choose 64- or 32-bit.

 

No, they don't. They just warn you that a 64-bit OS is needed to use all 4 GB. However, I bought the computer with 2 GB 1DIMM of RAM from Lenovo, and bought another stick from Crucial that I will be installing once I get the computer, so they wouldn't have known. I got the 64-bit install disk for free, so no big deal.

I believe I resolved the driver issue. I read on wikipedia and the driver page to learn more about what the Intel AMT features are, and they seem to be unneeded for my uses. Thanks for all the help guys, my computer is already in Louisville, so I should have it tomorrow.