FYI: 3000 C200 issues & fixes I found

I couldn't claim I'm an authentic tech type but here are a few apparent C200 bugs/incompatibilities I've found. Maybe they don't apply to everyone but seeing as these things happened for me on two in a row, I'd say they will apply to many. Especially if like me, you don't/aren't comfortable enough to immediately wipe a new system.

The machines referenced here are 89222BU models (XP Pro, core 2 duo T5500, 1.66 MHz, 1 GB RAM).

If your pointer becomes "sticky" (freezes, jerks, jumps; most obviously when clicking around inside My Computer or Windows Explorer); and maybe eventually you can barely play DVDs (they jerk, freeze, blur): For me at least there was an obvious connection between that issue and *updating* to the Realtek HD audio driver recently posted on Lenovo's site (and detected for those who use System Update). It's 5.10.0.5307, to "improve sound quality/equalizer adjusted." The one the system came with is 5.10.0.5282 and worked fine. After updating the sticky mouse issue appears, gets worse, and leads to other problems.

And rolling back driver or doing System Restore isn't enough to stop it. Neither was completely uninstalling 5.10.0.5307 & software (through both Device Manager & Add/Remove) and reinstalling 5.10.0.5282 & software. I needed to start over by doing a Lenovo factory-state Rescue & Recovery (pre-.5307 state would probably work too, if you have a Recovery backup from then), so that "pristine" 5.10.0.5282 state would return. Same as doing a reformat could accomplish I imagine. Maybe there are other things to try first, but even tech support couldn't think of any, since bad drivers can be impossible to recover from by less intrusive means.

If anyone has this problem out-of-box rather than after updating, maybe the 5.10.0.5307 version happened to already be in your system when it arrived. Or, you immediately reformat new systems and used the latest (but apparently not best!) driver .5307 posted on Lenovo's site. In that case... no copy of 5.10.0.5282 is on Lenovo's site as of now and it didn't appear to be on Realtek's site either. But it can be found on hp's site and doesn't appear to be OEM (worked fine for me). Or maybe it can be found on membership driver sites too.

Another thing I noticed on the two new systems, that I changed on mine but am not sure if was contributing to any of the problems I had, was that the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection driver they came with (version 10.5.1.68) is not the one listed on Lenovo's site as being the current correct one (10.5.1.59). I followed a formal procedure for uninstalling and re-adding three components -- wireless network driver & software; Microsoft UAA; then Realtek HD audio driver & software, in that specific order. Don't know if all that was actually necessary.

Also, this model seems to be completely, violently incompatible with AOL version 8.0 (don't know about 8.0 Plus). Ok yeah I know I know even a healthy system is violently incompatible with anything AOL lol. Well some people are going to use it no matter what anyone says, like my elderly parents, for whom I was prepping a C200. So it's useful info to pass on. The conflict happened on two C200s like clockwork, and (extra-thoroughly) uninstalling 8.0 and installing 9.0 allowed the system to work beautifully. (Even a *46%* RAM performance gain, from "significantly below average" for a machine with its specs to well above; and an end to some serious BSODs that among other things were keeping me from being able to install software of my choice).

Hope all this helps someone. Tech support was very "supportive" of these findings throughout my ordeal, but I don't know if any of them will take the time to see that testing is done and any necessary corrections or recommendations made. (You still get to talk to IBM tech support in Atlanta if you call, but they admittedly haven't had much experience with this model yet. It is very new, wasn't ever an IBM-designed model, and ships directly from Hong Kong if you order from Lenovo. From something I saw here, I think it may actually be built by Taiwanese company Compal.)

 

Towards the end of my review process, I did a factory restore of the C200. Previous to that I was using the machine on a daily bases at school, and everything was buttery smooth. Then right after the restore, the machine would have those little lockups. Mouse/keyboard would be unresponsive for seconds, and then unlock like nothing had happened. I am guessing I was shipping a slightly played with laptop with a few of the latest drivers, but I never thought to check any of that before my restore.

 

Hi dietcokefiend, I'm glad you posted that. I had read your review and wanted to contact you as one of the currently-rare fellow C200 owners I've found. Then I figured either you didn't "update" to .5307, or your machine must have come with some different drivers than the two I worked on. (These things can vary... I mean, GET THIS! One of the machines *accidentally* had Computrace on it -- lojack for laptops!! It's a paid service and that software is not even an option on this machine, and will be but I gathered isn't yet an option on higher end Lenovos. That took a couple hours on the phone with the Computrace manufacturer to remedy. Which I appreciated since it wasn't their fault and Lenovo/IBM couldn't help with that at all remotely.)

I don't want to jinx myself here but now things are, as you said "buttery smooth." Really great machine (at the moment). And this screen type is actually loved and preferred by some. I was just prepping them for others, but will miss them. Hope it's not too soon to be thinking I'm out of the woods!

 

The odd thing with my machine was since it had a "press" model number, the system update thing didn't bring up any updates or drivers for it.

With your C200, did you notice any of the following:

1. Battery % shows correctly, but doesn't show time remaining

2. Powering on from an off state that has been off for a while, pressing the power button once for short duration makes the power light blink, but then turns off and the machine doesnt turn on. Pressing button again makes machine turn on like normal. Sometimes, if I held the button down longer the first time, it booted up fine.

3. Restarting the machine, after it shuts down the OS, before it goes to the bios screen, it waits for like 20-30 seconds. It did this occasionally.

Most of these things seem to revolve around some wacky ACPI in the bios, and should be correctable under a bios update. Just wondering if my press machine had these issues by itself, or if others shared these.

 

Ah, maybe you already had the right wireless driver installed when you got it (instead of the one my machines had, that was never applicable to this model at any point in time), and that allowed the .5307 audio driver to work correctly. It seems that functioning of these things is all very inter-related. And one tech said an incorrect wireless driver could also cause things like spikes on the board or whatever. When you did a factory recovery maybe it took you back to a state where one or more of the same issues I had existed.

1. No, I don't get time remaining either... and didn't know I was supposed to! That would be handy. Guess I could set it to show the status bar and memorize how long a full status bar is! But with battery aging I guess that might get less and less accurate. Btw do you leave your power scheme on "Lenovo Default" or change it to something else, like "Portable/Laptop?" Never have known how much difference that makes.

2. I've been tinkering for quite awhile now but I have rarely shut it down, I've been leaving it on all the time and restarting as I make changes. If I notice that once I do start shutting it down more I'll post back. But I always do hold power buttons down a long time anyway, seems like so many machines need that.

3. YES! On both machines. Would go dead black, but with power light on, right? That worried me. Haven't seen it happen since I (hopefully) fixed some things, but as you said it is just occasional so we'll see. On the second machine, during the very first two restarts it did that as well as completely freezing at Lenovo logo screen. Had to shut down and start over. (Had just used msconfig to turn off unnecessary stuff but... it really was unnecessary stuff so... Actually the Lenovo/P.O.S.T. screen freeze I thought might have been related to the accidental computrace gearing up or something.)

Did you see the new BIOS (1.02) posted in December on Lenovo's site? I did put it in, but didn't notice any improvements to my particular issues afterwards.

 

Hey btw DCF, I was wondering, do you get any funny comments about the C200 when you're using it in public? Like, "Is that thing even current enough to be on wi-fi??" lol. As much as myself and my parents who I picked it out for prefer this screen type (increasing default color depth on this one improves quality hugely), I'm guessing that it might get some strange looks. I'll never understand why the screen thing (glossy vs. non and wide aspect vs. non) hasn't remained an apples and oranges matter, rather than the latter becoming virtually impossible to find.

 

Well, didn't really get any comments using it in any of my classes. To quiet to be noticed . I no longer have that laptop on hand, had to ship it back in at the beginning of this month.

 

Yes it is wonderfully quiet isn't it? Really I'm tempted to get one of these for myself, now that (jinxing myself here again) I seem to have it soooo stable. Last time I said that, something else happened almost immediately LOL. But it turned out to have nothing to do with the C200 in particular:

For anyone who lands here with the AOL issue mentioned above: If you had AOL 8.0 or 7.0 (not sure about even earlier versions) and upgrade to 9.0, make sure you don't have any files named ATWPKT* (*followed by various numbers) left over. You may need to set hidden files to show in order to find them, not sure. They aren't part of 9.0 and may try to connect to the net and cause a certain blue screen. Don't know if that just applies to also having a Sygate firewall, or any firewall. Here's a link for more on that:

http://forums.sygate.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10149&highlight=atwpkt2

I had scrubbed out AOL 8.0 pretty thoroughly (adding a couple good registry cleaners as well as searching from start menu). Skipped manual reg cleaning, but doubt this ATWPKT(etc.) thing would have been found with normal AOL search terms anyway.

 

I just bought 2 c200 and some other 6 friends bought too. All the machines present the same problem since first boot. They all come with the .5307 HD driver. I tested installing the .5366 driver that found in the Realtek site, it seemed that it work ok after one reboot, latter it came with the same problem.

Im trying to find the older driver and see if that would work, if any has found something else that may work plz posted.

BTW on system update of Lenovo Care only appear the LAN driver and the WiFi driver, there is a problem with the WiFi driver and is that the drivers is older that the one that it came with the laptop.

 

I just tested something that correct the problem and is that I killed the proceses RTHDCPL.exe that it suppose to be an Audio Control Panel, check it if you can.

 

Hi R3,

The first thing I do when I get a new computer is use msconfig to turn off unnecessary startup processes, and that was one of them. So that wasn't the issue in my case, but I'm glad it worked for you.

If the problem comes back, as I mentioned I did find the exact right driver at HP's site. But in my case I had updated to .5307, and as soon as it had touched the system it was too corrupted to just install the different driver or use System Restore. I had to use Rescue & Recovery to restore to factory state (which in my case took me back to the .5282 driver). So if your problem recurs, I don't know if you can fix it unless you can get a fresh start with .5307 never ever having been there. Which might take something like having Lenovo send you some earlier recovery discs.

Yeah, what you had happen was the same thing I had happen with System Update. Every tech I spoke to said do not ever use S.U., it often messes up. I don't know if they meant just on this model, or all, because at thinkpads.com it sounds like a good number of people do use it. Now I would only use S.U. to show me what it THINKS I need, then I'd go to the downloads page at Lenovo to compare. (Of course that wouldn't have helped in the case of this bad audio driver update.)

Once you are sure everything is working fine and you have your machine customized to where you want it, I highly recommend using the built-in Rescue & Recovery to make a backup and also an external DVD copy. At least now I know that if any future updates I download from Lenovo are bad, I can restore to my ideal state immediately.

Not-so-fun fact: After my postings here, the Fujitsu hard drive started making a knock noise so they sent me a new one (by Hitachi). But I was able to use the backup DVDs I made on the other one to customize it in a snap.

I think we are all through the woods now, but again I shouldn't jinx myself by saying that. And I did determine that the machine still does not like AOL, but less so with version 9.0 than 8.0... and not the machine's fault anyway on that count.

Hope things continue to work well for you.

 

Unfortunely the problem persist, and I have even installed the .5282 version and is still freezing, I have opened a request to lenovo to see what can they say about it. I also notice that the freezing occurs after the sound, for example when I play a mp3 file and press pause (with wmp) it gets freeze until I press continue o close the windows media player.

 

Hey R3,

I wish Lenovo would take the experiences reported by new owners seriously, and check them out. Several techs admitted to me that since this is a very new model, they themselves are only learning about it as they go along. And, that there in Atlanta the IBM techs are even less familiar than they'd usually be with a new model, since it was designed by a different company far far away after the buyout.

I saw without a doubt that .5307 was the problem, since twice I added it after doing a full factory-state Recovery, not realizing yet that it *was* the problem. I really tried to get Lenovo to look into it for the sake of others but nooo, there it was on their site available for "update" all along, and is now apparently pre-installed. Yet meanwhile, they completely took my word for it and were ready to send me whatever I wanted to fix it. What a waste.

Yeah, installing .5282 now probably couldn't have helped you, it didn't help me once .5307 had been there. I wouldn't let them take too much time on this or lead you down a bunch of other paths that aren't working. I think you should just insist that they send you a set of recovery CDs that have .5282 on them. Maybe there is actually a deeper underlying cause of the problem, something else that causes .5307 to malfunction. But unless they can tell you that they know exactly what you're talking about and name that other thing, I'd insist on the recovery CDs... and make sure they're *sure* they will have .5282 instead, and that they aren't just patronizing you and sending you the identical problem again.

I think the only reason we don't see more people posting about this on various forums (yet?) is just because apparently it's not a popular model at all, due to few people liking the kind of screen it has. But good luck and hang in there -- as of now, we are loving it and are very glad we kept it!

 

The think is that here the biggest comunication company is offering the lenovo laptop model c200 at a very good price and also offers to give it to you with out any first payment and the credit is for 24 months and without interests, so is becoming very popular around here.

Well if I get any response from lenovo ppl I'll post the results if there are any.

The other think I notice is this is the first laptop I see from IBM and lenovo that use AUU others use the AC'97 codec.

 

HI ALL

i am going to buy a lenovo 3000 c 200.....................i have read the review here and it is very helpful for me..............

i need any advice here for me...........................is the 512 mb ram is good..................increasing it to 1 gb..................any more advice is very wanted


thanks very much on your efforts and i am proud of this site really