New Lenovo laptop won't allow posting to Mango Lassi
-
@ajstringham Well, I also read that the ones on the website didn't work, so how do I confirm that they do work now before FUBAR'ing this machine?
-
@Dominica said:
@ajstringham Well, I also read that the ones on the website didn't work, so how do I confirm that they do work now before FUBAR'ing this machine?
You can download them and try installing them. If they say you have the latest version, you know it works. If it updates to the latest version, which is extremely common with drivers to have older versions pre-loaded on shipped machines, then you know they work.
-
@Dominica just make a note of ones that don't work.
-
@Dominica said:
@ajstringham Well, I also read that the ones on the website didn't work, so how do I confirm that they do work now before FUBAR'ing this machine?
That's pretty scary that a major vendor wouldn't have working drivers available for their flagship products. Seems pretty unlikely.
-
@Dominica said:
I just found a thread talking about how if you do a clean install and don't have all the Lenovo drivers for this machine, you are screwed.
Any drivers that they have should be in the restore partition even if the website ones are hosed.
-
Have a look at driver magician lite
It will help you extract drivers that are not included in Windows in red and you can get it to grab anything else that you think is important.Also, save the extracted drivers to a USB stick
-
Complete OS reinstall and the system is exactly the same afterwards. Something about the Lenovo-modified Windows 8.1 image is flaky and is causing very noticeable issues with posting or just basic web usage.
Might be anything. There is a lot of bloatware on there. But this feels like a network shim is in place hijacking traffic. It's just a guess but that is how it appears from the behaviour.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dominica said:
@ajstringham Well, I also read that the ones on the website didn't work, so how do I confirm that they do work now before FUBAR'ing this machine?
That's pretty scary that a major vendor wouldn't have working drivers available for their flagship products. Seems pretty unlikely.
They have working drivers. But think about it. They deploy a standard image to machines for several months often. That means that slightly newer variations of the chipset drivers, wifi drivers, etc are all released but not necessarily incorporated right away into that image. It happens. Shouldn't really be surprising. Has nothing to do with it being a flagship product.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
Complete OS reinstall and the system is exactly the same afterwards. Something about the Lenovo-modified Windows 8.1 image is flaky and is causing very noticeable issues with posting or just basic web usage.
Might be anything. There is a lot of bloatware on there. But this feels like a network shim is in place hijacking traffic. It's just a guess but that is how it appears from the behaviour.
I always wipe with a vanilla image. Lenovo, HP, Dell, all of them include tons of bloatware with their image. It's better, usually, when you get business machines. Yours came with 8.1 Home though, which means you can at least double the amount of trialware, etc that will come pre-loaded.
-
@ajstringham said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dominica said:
@ajstringham Well, I also read that the ones on the website didn't work, so how do I confirm that they do work now before FUBAR'ing this machine?
That's pretty scary that a major vendor wouldn't have working drivers available for their flagship products. Seems pretty unlikely.
They have working drivers. But think about it. They deploy a standard image to machines for several months often. That means that slightly newer variations of the chipset drivers, wifi drivers, etc are all released but not necessarily incorporated right away into that image. It happens. Shouldn't really be surprising. Has nothing to do with it being a flagship product.
I don't understand this at all. Their website should always have working drivers, and the latest ones. What does something being in an image have to do with that?
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dominica said:
@ajstringham Well, I also read that the ones on the website didn't work, so how do I confirm that they do work now before FUBAR'ing this machine?
That's pretty scary that a major vendor wouldn't have working drivers available for their flagship products. Seems pretty unlikely.
They have working drivers. But think about it. They deploy a standard image to machines for several months often. That means that slightly newer variations of the chipset drivers, wifi drivers, etc are all released but not necessarily incorporated right away into that image. It happens. Shouldn't really be surprising. Has nothing to do with it being a flagship product.
I don't understand this at all. Their website should always have working drivers, and the latest ones. What does something being in an image have to do with that?
No, you misunderstand. Their website, yes, always has the latest version. But when they build an image to deploy to, say, Yoga 2s that they are shipping, they build an image and start deploying it. Just because a new chipset driver comes out doesn't mean they are going to create an entire new image to deploy to machines they are shipping to customers. The driver might be one or two revisions behind from the latest that's on the website. But they put the drivers up on the website so that customers who get new machines can also confirm they have all the latest drivers and update if they don't. That image that was used for any given Yoga 2 could be months old. Everything at its core works fine, but the latest specific drivers might be a little behind. Happens all the time.
-
@ajstringham That's not what we are discussing. We are talking about the statement that the website had broken drivers. That's all. Any mention of the system images is something unrelated. I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm talking about the statement that Lenovo wasn't maintaining reliably working drivers for their products. This has nothing to do with system images.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham That's not what we are discussing. We are talking about the statement that the website had broken drivers. That's all. Any mention of the system images is something unrelated. I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm talking about the statement that Lenovo wasn't maintaining reliably working drivers for their products. This has nothing to do with system images.
I must have misread it somewhere. Their website is broken for drivers? Which ones? If it's the chipset, etc, you should just be able to get them straight from the hardware manufacturer's site.
-
@ajstringham said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@ajstringham That's not what we are discussing. We are talking about the statement that the website had broken drivers. That's all. Any mention of the system images is something unrelated. I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm talking about the statement that Lenovo wasn't maintaining reliably working drivers for their products. This has nothing to do with system images.
I must have misread it somewhere. Their website is broken for drivers? Which ones? If it's the chipset, etc, you should just be able to get them straight from the hardware manufacturer's site.
That doesn't excuse the site for being broken, but it's a viable work-around.
-
@ajstringham said:
I must have misread it somewhere. Their website is broken for drivers? Which ones? If it's the chipset, etc, you should just be able to get them straight from the hardware manufacturer's site.
That's what was said above was not working. That the drivers were not available from the vendor.
-
Downloading a completely fresh copy of Windows 8.1 that Lenovo has not tampered with. We are assuming that that will fix it.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
Downloading a completely fresh copy of Windows 8.1 that Lenovo has not tampered with. We are assuming that that will fix it.
Agreed. You have the ISOs and licenses if you want to upgrade to Pro. Just do it.
-
I had a nightmare with a fresh install on a Lenovo laptop. They have an update manager that downloads all the correct drivers, but it missed off the WWAN driver and I just couldn't find it anywhere. It's put me off buying Lenovo again, so after a brief flirtation, I'm back to being an HP only boy.
-
I've had issues with some Asus laptops where the drivers on their site were for different hardware then what was installed on the machine. I actually had to figure out what the underlying hardware was and go to the manufacturer's website to get those drivers. I hope Lenovo, arguably a more "enterprise" company, doesn't have the same issues.
-
@Dominica the cool thing about all the new Lenovos is they have a factory partition installed on them which can be accessed on startup. So if you do end up throwing a fresh install on there you still have your factory partition to fallback with.
