ThinkVantage "Productivity Center" vs. "Toolbox"

My trusty X61 was near its last legs and so I got a new T410, which I am generally very happy with. One peculiarity though is the behavior of the blue button. On my X61, pressing it would bring up the modestly useful ThinkVantage "Productivity Center", which looked like:



But on my new T410, it brings up the annoying and useless ThinkVantage Toolbox, which looks like:



(These aren't personal screencaps, by the way, just images I grabbed from GIS.)

This Toolbox takes a long time to load and its front screen as far as I can tell is nothing but come-on messages to buy a whole bunch of laptop accessories I don't want. I encountered this Toolbox on the X61 as well, but not by pressing the blue button.

What happened to the Productivity Center menu, and how do I get it back? Hunting around the menus and tabs produced no information about this.

 

I believe productivity center is gone with windows 7 (last available in Vista). It does not appear in the matrix for T410 http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-74582

 

Hmph. Well, crap.

 

I agree. I liked the Productivity Center as you could add RSS feeds to it. I used to be able to review all my favorite feeds just by pushing that button.

 

I think the new Toolbox is better. It seems more organized, but I never used the old version that much though. Superficially, it looked redundant to me (Access connections controls, Power manager, System Update, etc, I liked to use those apps instead of going through the Productivity center). And the old Productivity center seemed really slow to load, while the newest Toolbox version seems a little better at loading times. I think it'd be better to have all of the same functions as part of the Windows Mobility Center instead, however.

 

I dont like that it takes so long for Toolbox to load, thats why Im not using.

 

You can install the Vista version of the Thinkvantage Productivity Center on Windows 7 if you prefer that version, I did this before on my T61 and it worked fine. But lately now I just don't install it as I don't use it often myself to save resources.

 

Hadn't thought of that. I'll give it a try.

 

what do people think about not using either software at all, i.e. deleting them and let windows run the show?

 

Well it's supposed to do stuff that Windows doesn't do, like the hardware stress test, warranty information, system health, etc. I think it's a nice value added on to the computer, because if I suspect a hardware component is failing, I can test all hardware on the computer and theoretically replace it myself if possible.