'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

It's been a while since I last posted a status update on the laptop. I'd finally gotten enough of the IBM Lenovo utilities installed that it was approximately functional, but ended up running into a serious stability issue with the wifi software (to the point where the wifi card refused to enable its radio). Since I rather want working wifi, I spent an evening churning through drivers until I found a combination that works.

Step 1 is to totally ignore the supported versions listed in the release notes. They're full of lies and claim that my laptop (an R50p with an Intel 2915ABG wifi card) is supported when the installer thinks otherwise (except when they claim my laptop is unsupported and then install anyway). Fortunately Lenovo are nicer than most and provide download links for older versions, and so after trying multiple ones I eventually ended up with:

Access Connections v6.26.79
Hotkey Features Integration v3.81.0100 (later versions refuse to install)
Power Manager v6.68 (but see below...)
Protip: binary search is the way to do this, as O(log n) is much faster than O(n).

That combination all installed and seemed to mostly behave - importantly, I could now enable the wifi radio again! However that's not the end of the story, because now that I had the power management tools installed I fired that up to put together a better power scheme than the default, and in the process apparently crashed the embedded controller. And wouldn't you know, but the embedded controller is responsible for such things as making the keyboard work. And the mouse. And the display. And, most annoyingly, the power button. The only way to reset it is to remove the battery.

Some searching threw up a known bug where the embedded controller hangs if queried for detailed battery status - I suspect that the power management tools triggered this, as I'm using a significantly newer and shinier version than what was available when I was running XP on the laptop. So, next task is to try older versions of that until I find one that no longer triggers the crash.


On the hardware side of things, the improved heatsink turned up and is waiting to be installed. However the processor upgrade did not appear - the online tracking shows that it never made it from China to Europe and the random eBay seller was not particularly helpful when I initially prodded them over it. I can't be bothered to dispute the transaction for all of £10, so I'll probably try again with a hopefully slightly-less-shady eBay seller.

Having finally resurrected Nyx (which seems mostly stable - the graphics driver has only imploded once so far), it's time to turn my attentions to Aether. As tempting as it is to just simultaneously upgrade all the things, it's useful to have at least one (mostly) working computer.

And today's upgrade is... *rolls dice*... Windows 7! Because there's a massive question mark over hardware compatibility, I wanted to take a backup of the SSD first so I can roll back if it all goes pear shaped. And because there's a similarly massive question mark over the reliability of the USB-to-everything adapter I've got, I picked up a couple more tools for the bits box:



Yes, it's another mSATA adapter, and yes, the first thing I did when I got it was take the mounting bracket off so I could see what was underneath. This time it's mSATA-to-SATA and so there's merely some power circuitry... which is a bit curious, because the SATA power connector in theory does have a 3.3V rail. Except there's a lot of Molex-to-SATA adapters that only provide 5V and 12V, so I suppose one can't actually rely on it being present. Especially here where I'm using a SATA-to-eSATA/USB cable that only provides 5V.

That forms the other part of the puzzle - see, my desktop has an eSATA port, and so it made sense to go with that rather than plain USB as in theory it should be a lot faster (in practice it was merely somewhat faster). Since eSATA doesn't provide power I found a combined eSATA/USB cable that pulled 5V from the USB port, and so had the whole mess dangling off the back of Nyx. To actually image the drive I ended up using... *rolls more dice*... Paragon Backup and Recovery Free - using DriveImage is considered unwise in this day and age, and Acronis doesn't entirely get on with Nyx.

Even more curiously there's an unpopulated USB socket on the adapter. I wonder what that's for?

Anyway, once imaged I stuck the SSD back in Aether and fed a 32-bit Windows 7 DVD to it. I did contemplate doing a dual boot or side-by-side install, but realistically if this worked I'd stay put in Windows 7 land and not boot the old XP install. So I just told the installer to use the existing partition without reformatting (the installer did save a copy of the old Windows folder, which is a nice touch). The actual install was surprisingly easy, and even more amazingly Windows Update had drivers for everything short of the sound hardware. Including the ATi FireGL T2 graphics (which AMD have disavowed all responsibility for) and the Intel 2915ABG wifi (which Intel claims won't work on Windows 7).

As with all major computer changes a new name is in order, and so the frankenlaptop is now known as Hemera, the personification of the day (to match Nyx, the personification of the night).