My work Thinkpad (a T61) was becoming a little crufty, so I decided to reinstall it from scratch. Here are a few lessons I learnt along the way:

• Making a hot copy of your entire drive onto a USB hard disk with VMWare Converter beforehand is a great idea. This basically means you have your entire previous installation still bootable, so you can rescue any data or settings you forgot about, after you’ve done the reformat and reinstall. VMWare Converter is free.
• Windows XP won’t install if the BIOS has the SATA controller set to AHCI mode - it won’t find the HD to install to. Read the install instructions for the SATA driver before installing Windows. Doing this without a floppy drive involves installing Service Pack 2 first (see below).
• Windows, surprisingly, does not contain a driver that can work with the Ethernet controller. Have a copy of it ready on a USB stick.
• The redistributable version of Service Pack 3 isn’t standalone, despite claims to the contrary; it pre-reqs. at least Service Pack 1. Windows Update won’t take you the whole way there, so it’s easiest to get the SP2 and SP3 standalones.
• The USB ports will not operate at high speed until you install the Intel Chipset Device Software.

Until recently, I was having problems with fullscreen video in Windows on my new T61 Thinkpad, which uses an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M display adapter. Video would regularly flicker when fullscreen was enabled in a variety of players, including Windows Media Player and various embedded Flash players, and had to be taken out of fullscreen and put back - sometimes as many as 10 times - before the image was stable.

After doing a bit of hunting around yesterday, and noticing that at least one other person had the same problem, I came to the conclusion that it was power-saving based - my suspicion is that the refresh rate is reduced under some power-saving circumstances.

The following set of steps seems to remove the problem (or, to be more exact, I haven’t seen the problem return since following them):

• Open the NVIDIA control panel (from the Start Menu or the system tray).
• Navigate to Mobile / Change PowerMizer settings.
• Select Not manage my power consumption (Disable PowerMizer).

Hope this helps someone else.

Normally I don’t touch pre-release software these days (apart from the IBM software I work with, of course). But I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3 RC1. And boy, Mozilla weren’t kidding - it’s noticeably faster and snappier than Firefox 2. Very impressive. For someone like me who spends a lot of time in a browser, this is just great.