I’ve just reinstalled a fresh copy of Vista on my T61 (luckily on a new larger disk, so I still have the old install).  Two days ago, all I’d have to do now was download and run ThinkVantage System Update, which would find and install all the individual bits of software, drivers etc that make the Thinkpad offering so great.

Now to have the full “ThinkVantage experience”, I’d have to trawl through the lenovo support site, download and individually install over 20 separate components. Many of them insist on a reboot, so this would take a very long time.

Lenovo recently asked on their blog which of the ThinkVantage utilities they should concentrate development on moving forward. Lenovo: if you kill ThinkVantage System Update:

1. You may as well not bother developing ANY of the other ThinkVantage applications any more
2. I may as well buy a Dell at half the price

I don’t have the time to find and install all these individual components now, never mind regularly reading your support website to manually determine if I need to upgrade them.

Because I have work to do, without ThinkVantage System Update I’ll be running a standard install of Vista.  Just like I’d be running on any of your competitors laptops.

I’m not the only one to be disappointed by this:

• http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=367950
• http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_Interest_Utilities&thread.id=4397
• http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=74929

Update (1st June 2009): After listening to the mountains of complaining customers, Lenovo has reinstated system update.

There’s a simple GUI to kick a backup off (backup and restore center), but unfortunately it’s rather restrictive.  It only lets you backup to a directly attached hard disk (e.g. USB) or to DVDs.  Fortunately the underlying engine DOES support backing up to a network file share.

To kick off a one-off backup, start an elevated command prompt (Start menu, Accessories, right click “command prompt” and select “Run as Administrator”) and type the following:

wbadmin start backup -allCritical -backupTarget:\\SERVER\SHARE -include:C: -vssFull

replacing \\SERVER\SHARE with the path to your network share location.  It’ll ask if you’re sure and then display its backup progress.  When it’s finished you should see it’s created a folder called WindowsImageBackup\MachineName on your backup share.  If you dig under this folder you can find it stores the entire backup in a .vhd file (virtual hard disk, also used by Microsoft’s virtualisation products).

You can schedule backups to run regularly using the task scheduler to call the command above, and adding “-quiet” to stop it prompting.  There’s a full guide to scheduling complete pc backups here.

EDIT: Apparently this is all fixed in Windows 7.

Vista allows you to configure which hardware sources can wake up the system from sleep, so for example you can enable or disable Wake On Lan.  It also allows software to schedule a wakeup, and Media Centre is one such beast.  Ever since I started playing with Media Centre, the system has randomly woken up from sleep (and not returned to sleep afterwards), which kinda defeats the purpose of sleep!

It’s quite easy to find out the source of the most recent wakeup (powercfg /lastwake), but this lists all software sources as “RTC”.  It doesn’t identify *which* process (or scheduled task) was responsible.

I found one solution over at thegreenbutton (thanks to mxcrowe):

If you do this, your computer will not auto-wake for any reason (s/w reason – I suppose WOL etc. will still work).  This info was given to me by another poster here on the Green Button:

1. Open a CMD prompt
2. powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
3. powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
4. powercfg -setactive scheme_current

This changes and applies a new power scheme that stops the machine from being woken from sleep. In my case, I have a desktop system and probably didn’t need to set the DC option, but I did both anyway.

Vista keeps a log of application and kernel crashes in Control Panel -> Problems Reports and Solutions -> View problem history:

Double clicking on the latest Windows “shut down unexpectedly” shows the blue screen details. These don’t give much useful information, for example which driver was responsible:

Clicking on “View a temporary copy of these files” opens an explorer window with the crash dump file, which you can copy to your own directory.

To analyse the crash dump you’ll need to install the Microsoft Windows Debugging Tools (17MB msi).  This adds a whole set of command line tools under “C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)”.  Use the dumpchk.exe tool to analyse the crash file:

And there’s the culprit: “Probably caused by: eacfilt.sys”.  This is the driver used by Nortel’s Contivity VPN client.  I’m using the “vista friendly” version, which worked fine before I applied Vista SP1, but I guess SP1 broke its driver.  The solution to all my problems? Uninstall it!

Hurrah! My T61’s suspend and hibernate work again!

For help with this and other Vista problems, these books may be useful:

I found a solution on the lenovo forum, apparently the T61’s UPEK fingerprint reader driver 1.9.2.99 can be responsible. I’ve installed version 1.9.2.111 (download directly from UPEK), but I still get blue screens if I hibernate.

Other drivers known to be incompatible with SP1 are listed on Microsoft KB 948343, but I’m pretty sure I’m not running any of them. Any ideas?

Update (16th May 2008): The problem turned out to be Nortel’s Contivity VPN client.  They don’t appear to have released an updated version since SP1 was released.  I no longer have a need for this VPN client, so I simply uninstalled it.  Problem solved!

While I was trying to get to the bottom of this I read many suggestions.  Dodgy memory seems to be a common cause, and this can be checked by booting memcheck and leaving for a few hours.