Installation story

[Chris Schumann <whizkid@home.dwave.net>]

It's now 12:13 on Wednesday morning.

Today at work, I got a Toshiba 810MB hard disk and Windows 95, so I was 
very eager to get them running. I got home, backed up all the important 
data on my lowly 170MB disk (onto floppies - ugh).

Then I set about installing the hard disk. I pulled out the old one, and
after examining it carefully, I pulled back the sticker over the part near
the clamp that holds it in place. I removed the two screws there, and the
case snapped apart with just a little prying. Nothing broke - no sonic
bonds or plastic tabs. 

The Toshiba drive is a bit thinner than the IBM drive, but it went right
into the caddy (just checking now, it is hard to get the security tab out,
but I have never used that, and you can get it out with some effort). The
tricky part was the short adapter cable. The IBM drive pin array has an
extra set of two non-pins on one end (if you've looked, you know what I
mean), so I assumed that the Toshiba drive connected with those pins
empty, and I was right. I used the BIOS disk test to give the drive a
whirl, and after minor anxiety attacks and whirring sounds, the drive
passed. 

The drive is noticably louder than the IBM, but not annoyingly so.

The next step was to install Windows 95 upgrade from scratch. Well of 
course you can't do that, so I installed a bare DOS setup with the DOS 
6.1 disks that came with the machine (ah yes, the good old days). I then 
started the setup, and after three disks (I bought the 3.5" version), it 
asked for a qualifying product. I popped in the disk labelled IBM WINDOWS 
3.1 (gotta love that) and away it went, but very slowly for the remainder 
of the 13 disks.

Using the TPWIN95.TXT file from the ftp site, I went back and saw that the
latest version of the BIOS I have on floppy is 1.20. Oops! They recommend
1.41 or later, and I will do that, because after a suspend, any keypress
locks the system for the better portion of a minute. 

I then installed the VESA driver from the Video Features disk.
1024x768x256 colors like a champ. 

Next was ThinkPad Features - Fuel, video, suspend settings... no problems.

Next was PCMCIA. I got the Windows 95 versions running just fine, but 
they do not light the PC Card LED. (Any hints?)

I also installed the Audio 1.31, even though I prefer the lean mean 1.0
version. It was strange seeing a help message that said "If you are
installing an audio device driver on you IBM ThinkPad, you may have to
install it twice." It was right. 

There's a suspend command on the start menu. Seems to work just like Fn4.

The Toshiba drive is a great product... even with no manual. I'm 
surprised Quantum and Micropolis aren't jumping into this market.

Windows 95 is very slow, as one would expect with 4MB of RAM. My 16MB 
card is on back-order.

Any questions?

Chris

(Now if I can only install the pen driver, I'll be set!)