T61

My wife's old ThinkPad T23 is getting long in the tooth. The wireless continues to loose NetBIOS so from time to time she can't get to the shared My Documents nor print. And the DVD drive keeps disappearing and reappearing. She's been exceptionally tolerant of it (more than I would have been).

So when her birthday came around this year, I found her a Lenovo ThinkPad T61. Don't worry. I also got her some Irish pottery.

It came with Vista Business and 1GB of RAM. I added a second GB.

The OEM Vista was pretty clean as it was a business load.

All seemed well until I started using it. I started having flashbacks of my previous Vista experience.

I had the same problem installing the printers. At least I knew how to fix it but that shouldn't be a problem.

I also have a problem connecting consistently to my WPA network although I'm not convinced that's not a Lenovo issue.

Then when I got it all hooked up, I ran into of all things performance problems! It was taking 5+ seconds to open a new tab. Most of that time, IE7 sat with "Connecting..." in the tab name. All it was trying to open was about:blank.

My friend Google finally turned up this forum post at Microsoft. The gist of it is that the slowdown was due to a BHO (CPwmIEBrowserHelperObject) that Lenovo had installed.

I aggressively disabled (Tools/Internet Options/Programs/Manage add-ons) any add-on that I didn't know that I wanted and now the T61 runs great.