The Next Step: Installing ALL the X200's Drivers
I'm going to post this for posterity, on the chance it helps someone else.
I just spend almost 4 hours getting the last 5 drivers installed. First thing, you'll do well to have a USB NIC to use to connect to the internet, until you can download and install the wireless network drivers.
I'll try to keep the rest in as sequential an order as I can remember. It's 3:35 a.m., please keep that in mind...
1) I installed SP3 Standalone, a copy of which I keep on my USB thumbdrive. Good move. Dramatically reduces the number of updates you need to wade through at Windows Update.
2) Same-same for IE8. Also good to do this before going to Windows Update, but after the wireless interent (or wired, I suppose) is up and running, so that you can update IE8, and not have IE6 and all it's updates, IE7, etc... cluttering up the Update window.
3) At Lenovo's Driver download page. Someone somewhere mentioned something about installing some kind of automatic software to find, download and install all the drivers automatically. I read this after spending 3 hours trying to find them all one at a time. Unfortunately, the message I got from Lenovo when trying to run this tool was that it was only designed to be used with Windows 7. Might have been a glitch, and might work for someone else. Figured I'd mention it early so that if it does work, someone doesn't waste time.
4) The Lenovo Drivers are REAL tricky. You'd like to think it's just a matter of downloading them, saving them, launching then and the installation is automatic. No, no, NO ! Don't think that way. That thinking cost me 2 hours or more. After running the installation/set-up/whatever file, you then MUST read the "read me" text file on the Lenovo driver page, because many of the drivers have a different installation method. A few want to be run from a specific directory (usually where the set-up file dumps them), and one wants to be run from the Start > Run > cmd (command line). Many of the "set-up" files do not actually set-up and/or "install" anything (although some do), they just copy the data from where you launch the set-up to a "C:\drivers\win\..." directory. You have to go there to actually launch the REAL installation executable. Oh yeah, and at least one of the drivers needs to be installed by working backwards from Device Manager>Update Driver>Install from specific location and then aim the wizard at the driver directory that you find in the "read me" file.
MAIN POINT: Read ALL the "read me" files. It's goofy stupid, tedious and time consuming, but the only alternative is to miss this point, and keep hunting for drivers when their installation files are buried on your hard drive already.
5) Oh yeah. Do the CHIPSET drivers. Duh. They solve I think 2 of the last oddball hardwares missing drivers. SM Bus Controller, I think. I should note here that ALL the drivers I needed came from the Lenovo Driver page. Other forum's posts have people saying they can't find them there, and they are going to other sites, and using drivers for other models of laptops, etc... Completely unnecessary; everything I needed was on the Lenovo site.
6) Install the Proset utility, but don't install any of the software; it's not needed. Just the driver is good enough. Windows Wireless Configuration can run the wireless just fine; you don't need to different softwares installed, both trying to do the exact same thing. Plus, Proset is junk and WZC gives massages with happy endings.
7) Lessee, what else... Oh yeah, don't forget to install the software for the tablet stylus pen. I downloaded software directly from Waccom (Google "x200 stylus") and I think it's different than the software you would (probably, I was in a hurry and was tired of looking at Lenovo) find at Lenovo. The Waccom software was quick, and seemed more functional than what I think I remember was on the Vista O/S. Not my computer so I can't say for certain. The Wacomm software has a "calibrate" function if the stylus is 3/4" from where the mouse is (mine was). "Calibrate" fixed that in about 30 seconds.
8) Umm... Well I went crazy and used Easeus Partition Manager (used to be Magic, I think) and made an 11 Gbyte partition after all the installing, updating, drivering and fiddling was over. It's on a 320 Gbyte drive, so there's plenty of room. Then, I used XXClone to make a clone of the newly-installed Operating System with all the drivers and stuff, and all the TIME invested into it, so that if the O/S ever goes bad for whatever reason (infection, etc...) the clone can be used to re-create the newly-completed installation, so I won't have to do all of that stuff all over again. Won't help if the HD goes bad, but now that I've discovered HDD Regnerator v 1.71, HD's don't go bad for me anymore. (little hint, there....)
9) Activate your O/S before you clone it.
10) I like MyDefrag's "Monthly" data compaction and reordering script. Knocks at least 5 seconds off the boot time, and on really fragmented machines it cuts the boot time in half.
11) Disable all the crap services, like "Help & Support", "Error Reporting", "Fast User Switching", "Secondary Logon", "NetBIOS / IP Helper", "Remote Registry" and few others. Google "Black Viper" for a couple more. Switching Auto Connection Manager from Manual to Automatic will speed up the boot process by about 2 seconds, I think because it doesn't have to "manually" decide it has a wireless card and think about whether or not to make a connection (equals delay).
12) AVG is tried-and-true, but I'm learning to like Avira lately. Avast! is horrible for too many reasons to list here. No scanner being one of them.
I'm subscribed to this thread, and should recieve e-mails if anyone needs some free advice that is worth what you pay for it.