Update Weekend

Ha, Saturday a public holiday, not much planned – I can really do what I want this weekend (eg. enabling comments in my blog).

BEEP! Wrong assumption, thanks for playing.

Instead of backing up, reinstalling XP and trying to install Vista and openSuSe 10.2 on my laptop, I had the pleasure of fixing/updating Flo’s Thinkpad T60p, Pipos Sony Vaio and backing up and installing from scratch SWMBO’s Targa Visionary XP120 (don’t ask). And upgrading SWBO’s blog to Serendipity 1.1 along the way.

 

---

 

Pipo’s Sony Vaio dropped the WLAN-connection every few minutes. Playing around with the WLAN-settings seemed to have fixed that problem rather quickly. The few quirks he additionally reported were fixed rather quickly too.

Flo’s Thinkpad T60 was a different story. Although all relevant Windows Updates were installed and the Sophos Anti-Virus Software was up-to-date, performance was sluggish. So I ran a full scan with Ad-Aware and Sophos, finding nothing. He also was not able to activate ActiveConnections via Fn-F5. The old problem. After optimizing the Path-Variable, performance was way up and AC worked again.
Installing the ThinkVantage Software Updates took the better half of the afternoon, a routing problem of our ISP slowing down the downloads considerably. Performance improved somewhat, but there are still way to much processes running. If you know of a good (free) tool to improve the number of running processes in Windows XP SP2, please let me know.

And there was SWBO’s Targa Visionary XP-120. IT’S NOT MY FAULT! It was bought before my time!
But I had to back it up and reinstall it, as the harddisk had a few bad sectors and was acting up. Fortunately, I had a desktop PC at hand, so I removed the harddisk from the Targa an cloned it to another spare harddisk using GParted, after I ran a chkdsk to fix the ntfs file system. And just for good measure, I also backed up the drive with a file-copy.

Then it was time for a low-level-format, followed by an NTFS-Format and a thorough chkdsk. Right now, the harddisk is back in the Targa and I am in the process of installing Windows XP. From a recovery CD. With SP1. Yeah, don’t ask.

For the Targa Visionary XP-120, I nedded the following drivers:

• VIA Hyperion Pro Driver Package Version 5.10A (Chipset, Harddisk, …)
• VIA Vinyl Audio driver Version - 6.80b (Sound)
• VT6107 & Integrated LAN Combo Driver Version - 4.4
• Realtek RTL8180L (WLAN)
• Ati Mobility Radeon 9600 /Grafics)

After I brought the systems drivers up to date, I installed XP Service Pack2 2 – fortunately from CD – and after that, all the other „important” updates. I left out Media Player 11 and IE 7. ;)
Oh, and the ATI-Installer really sucks! It displays „Catalyst installation has completed” while it is still installing.
I really do not know, how you would do such a thing without a broadband connection. There were literally hundreds of megabytes I had to download.

Several hours later, I was ready for some applications:

1. Firefox
2. Thunderbird
3. Flash
4. Shockwave
5. Java
6. Quicktime
7. Real Player
8. VLC
9. WinAmp
10. Acrobat Reader

Seven hours later, the laptop was ready to use. Now I have to copy the data back. But that will happen tomorrow.

Tagged as: Ein_Tag_im_Leben, it, laptop, software, targa, thinkpad | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Sonntag, 20070107, 20:21 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)