[ltp] Removing the pre-desktop area

[Aaron Mulder]

	I put in a new hard drive.  That's a pretty good excuse to get the 
CD's shipped by the way -- they can't argue about whether it's possible to 
delete the partition if you've removed the drive.  The did it for free 
with no complaints, and it had been about 6 months since I bought the 
machine.

	However there are 4! rescue CDs, and if you don't allocate enough
space, it tries to install some funky compressed disk format and many of
the drivers fail to install and convert.exe won't convert it and you get a
generally non-working XP installation.  I tried with a little under 8GB
and that was not enough -- when I called IBM, they said 8GB was the
minimum but sounded a little dubious.  It turns out that the XP install
key on the bottom of the machine does not work with a normal Windows XP
CD, but it does work with the CDs Dell ships with their recent laptops,
and then you can download all the drivers and much of the pre-installed
software from the IBM web site.

	The Access IBM button now brings up a new non-graphical menu with
only 2 options, one of which is to enter the text mode BIOS config, and I
think the other one is something useless.

Aaron

On 25 Oct 2003, Rich Smrcina wrote:
> Many thanks to all who responded.  One more question (I think).  With
> the pre-desktop area gone, is the Access IBM button pretty much
> useless?  How does one get into the BIOS?