Windows XP

Red Alert!  Immediately on receipt of the laptop, boot to XP and make a set of recovery/restore CDs - or DVDs.  IBM does not provide these free anymore.  You can make a set using the utility available in XP.  Installing System Commander (and perhaps other boot managers) makes the T43's service partition unavailable, and it may not be possible to create restore media without it!

 

Shallow Justification

Sadly, there are still a few things that I need that are windows only :(  The situation is is improving - I see that Actel has versions of Libero for Linux and Solaris - but for now this will be a multi-boot machine.  With the T43 I am going fully over to the dark side and allowing Windows XP automatic updates.

 

Minor Tweaks

• Autoplay

  The damned autoplay "feature" was driving me nuts.  Any time I plugged in a USB flash drive or USB hard drive XP would try to find something to play.  It popped up nag screens (one per partition!!!) that had to be dealt with.

  To turn it off:

  run gpedit.msc
  Local Computer Policy->Computer Configuration->Admistrative Templates->System
  double click Turn Off Autoplay
  select CD-ROM Drives (which includes removable hard drives) or All Drives (which includes removable memory)

  Selecting All Drives will also disable Audio CD autoplay.

   

• Locked CD Drives

  After installing some software from CD I found that I couldn't eject the media.  This seems to be caused by the IBM (Sonic) DLA drag-to-burner feature.

  Right clicking on the CD drive and un-checking DLA allows eject "this time" but it immediately reverts to its prior behavior.  To permanently turn it off right click on the drive, select properties, go to the DLA tab, and un-select  there.

   

• Task Bar Size

  The T43 has a 1400x1050 14.1" LCD.  It makes the icons and fonts a little small for my old eyes.  Along with fiddling some of the application fonts I found it handy to increase the taskbar size.  Interestingly that is controlled by "Active Title Bar" size in Display->Apperance->Advanced.  (Right click on your desktop).

   

• VIM settings

  I tend to do my code editing on the laptop (or sometimes the deskside) in XP while actually running the test code on the target Solaris or Linux machine.  I'ts handy to keep the source module I'm editing up on the Win box while the Unix box is getting smacked around by driver testing.

  Vim is my preferred editor on all platforms.  I keep this vimrc file in C:\Program Files\Vim so the editor comes up with my preferred window size and font.