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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘ThinkPad’ Category

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Mapping of Lenovo ThinkPad W701 SATA bays to boot devices

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/04/22

The Lenovo ThinkPad W701 can have three (3!) SATA spindles, one of which is through the Serial Ultrabay Enhanced bay, the other 2 can be hard drives.

Below is the mapping between the bays and the boot devices.

The bays are numbered as in the ThinkPad W700, W700ds, W701, and W701ds Hardware Maintenance Manual.

  1. Internal SATA Port 1; ATA HDD0 or ATA CD0: 1030 Serial Ultrabay Enhanced device (page 90)
  2. Internal SATA Port 2; ATA HDD1: 1040 Hard disk drive (HDD) slot 1 (page 92)
  3. Internal SATA Port 0; ATA HDD2: 1040 Hard disk drive (HDD) slot 0 (page 92)
  4. External SATA Port 4: unknown
  5. External SATA Port 5: unknown

Note that the slot order and the boot device order is counter intuitive, espcially since the W701 ships with a HDD in slot 1 (which is ATA HDD0), and the SATA ports don’t map to the HDD numbers.

I don’t know yet which External SATA Port maps to the USB/eSATA combo connector mentioned on page 195.

Some remarks:

The Serial Ultrabay Enhanced bay is probably HDD0 because it is also CD0, and it makes sense to boot from CD first when you install a machine.

ATA CD0 is for one these optical devices:

ATA HDD0, 1 and 2 can be one of those HDD devices (for ATA HDD2 you need a Serial Ultrabay Enhanced adapter, either 9.5mm or 12.7 mm high):

  • 1.8 inch SATA SSD through adapter FRU 42W7888
  • 2.5 inch SATA SSD
  • 2.5 inch SATA HDD

The Serial Ultrabay Enhanced adapter can hold 12.5 mm drives, the other bays can only hold 9.5 mm drives.

It looks like the W701 is the last ThinkPad that ships with a 1920 x 1200 screen (all newer models have HD screens of 1920 x 1080, so you loose 10% of your screen height).

I learned that the yellow USB port is the powerd one (if it is disabled, you can enable the power in the BIOS)

–jeroen

Posted in BIOS, Boot, Power User, ThinkPad, W701 | 1 Comment »

SwitchResX helped me switch my Mac machine to 1360×768 and 1888×1062

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/12/24

A while ago, I got involved in Mac programming again after more than a decade of absence.
It felt like a warm reunion.

A Mac Mini Server serves as a development machine: it is about the same price as a regular Mac Mini, but packs 2 HDDs which for me is more useful than one HDD and a DVD player.

However, living in the Windows world for a long time long, and having had RSI in the DOS era almost two decades ago, I had a few wishes for using it.

The first was keyboard wise. The second is custom resolutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Development, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, RSI, Software Development, UltraNav keyboards, xCode/Mac/iPad/iPhone/iOS/cocoa | 10 Comments »

Nick Hodges | The End of the Chow Line

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/30

From the comments on Nick’s excellent post (that instantly made me feel hungry <g>):

If you find your developers bringing in their own equipment to work then you know there is a problem.

That reminds me of this story: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Opinions, Personal, Power User, RSI, ThinkPad, UltraNav keyboards | Leave a Comment »

Windows 7 x64 on ThinkPad T61p

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/03/06

Somehow, the latest Windows Vista automatic update screwed my laptop.

It didn’t manage to make a System Restore Point, but in stead managed to remove all previous restore points.

In addition, my laptop now performed like a dog because of excessive disk activity on the primary HDD (login took 30 minutes).
Safe Mode and Safe Mode with Network were fine, so I tried to figure out what was wrong, but gave up after a day of investigating with Process Monitor and Process Explorer, and stopping/pausing allmost all services and killing/pausing almost all processes.

So: I bit the bullet and Installed Windows 7 x64 on my fully loaded T61p.

The machine has dual 7200 rpm 500 Gb drives (I have not used physical DVD’s or CD’s in years), with 4 Gb of memory (the official maximum, but I recently heard it can actually handle 8 gigabyte fine).
It functions as a host (my work is almost exclusively in a virtual machines so I can separate things), so it needs to be a balance of functional but lean installation.

Most of the installation process was straight forward (in fact much more straightforward than getting Vista on it).

Here is the run-down that includes the things I bumped into:

  1. Installed the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to copy the installation DVD to a bootable USB stick (I know there many guides on doing this by hand, but I like to be pragmatic).
  2. Booted from the USB stick and did basic install
  3. Be surprised about how much hardware was supported out of the box
  4. Installed these Lenovo drivers (most from the T61p drivers and software matrix):
    UltraNav driver (for thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrackPoint– which I love – and the TouchPad – which I disabled)
    FingerPrint driver (I really like the biometric fingerprint login over typing my password)
    Hotkey driver (more formally called “features integration”)
    4-in-1 Ricoh  multi card reader driver (which is not on the driver matrix, and supports SD/SDIO/MMC/MMCplus, MS/MS-Pro, xD Picture Card, and IEEE 1394/FireWire)
  5. DAEMON Tools Lite (a virtual CD/DVD player – ideal on a 2 HDD setup)
  6. GhostScript and FreePDF (so I can print to PDF files and view PostScript files)
  7. Adobe Reader (there are faster and smaller PDF viewers, but nothing beats the original)
  8. Google Chrome (my favorite browser, I use other browsers for testing web-stuff, but those are in virtual machines)
  9. Fiddler2 (for monitoring HTTP/HTTPS traffic when things go wrong, or I need a direct download URL of something
  10. Skype (the new 4.x, even though it is almost unworkable compared to the old 3.8.0.188, the old version keeps crashing under Windows 7. I moved my Skype Chat History)
  11. VMware Workstation (note that officially you need version 7 to run Windows as host or guest, 6.5.3 does seem to work for some people)
  12. 7zip (my favourite compression tool)
  13. My standard BIN directory with my favourite light weight command-line tools (did I mention I’m from they keyboard age? Hence the love for the TrackPoint)

Windows 7 feels a lot faster than Windows Vista, and requires a lot less memory for itself (slightly more than 1 gigabyte, where Vista needs almost half a gigabyte more).

–jeroen

Ref: Re: Device Manager unknown devices T61p – lenovo community.

Posted in Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, RSI, ThinkPad, UltraNav keyboards | 6 Comments »

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