T61

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.

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.