The reason is that Lenovo crippled the SATA-interface of a lot older notebooks probably to keep the compability with ultrabay-slim-devices. The notebooks possess a SATA II-interface (up to 3.0 GBit/s) but are limited to SATA I (up to 1.5 GBit/s). While that is still good enough for normal harddrives, SSDs may handle the full 3.0 GBit/s (and more) nowadays.

Notebookreview.com-forums’ user ‘middleton’ created a modified BIOS for most affected notebooks which removes the restriction. It comes as an EXE-file which updates the BIOS directly. However this only works on 32-bit versions of Windows. If you use a 64-bit version or another operating system you have to burn the included ISO-file on a CD or DVD and boot from it. The following table shows the supported Thinkpad-models and the corresponding BIOS-update-files:

DISCLAIMER: Use these modified bios at your own risk!!

These modified bios have been beta tested to confirm they do not brick the system after flash. However data integrity tests take time and it’s up to the user to confirm there is no data loss due to the increased SATA-II interface speed. You will be solely responsible for any damage to your computer system or loss of data that results from flashing or using of the patched BIOS.

Lenovo have never tested or approved these patched bios and doesn’t support them. They are provided “as is” without any warranties from Lenovo. These bios-es are completely unofficial releases.

last update: 10-12-2011

Update (10-12-2011): The notebookreviews-forum (where the files come from) has been down for some months. I gathered links for the latest files. If any of them is offline, please tell me in the comments so I can upload them again.

As shown in the table, the modified BIOS comes with further improvements.

SLIC 2.1

Stands for “Software licensing information code” which is a technique used by OEM-computerseller to execute Windows-installations without having to activate it (which is required from Windows XP onwards). SLIC 2.1 is required to use that feature with Windows 7. I don’t really need that feature since Windows’ product activation doesn’t hurt, but especially Windows 7-users without internet-connection (or valid license-key) may appreciate it.

whitelist removed

If you try to use the MiniPCI Express-slot with Non-Lenovo cards you’ll get Error 1802 after starting. This fix removes the whitelist so you can use cards of any manufacturer.

Thermal sensing

On a few models with Intel Core 2 Duo “Penryn” CPU the user gets a “Thermal Sensing error” upon starting the system which has to be canceled by pressing Escape. This fix removes the error-message.

CTRL-FN-Swap

You can find the CTRL-key on most notebooks in the bottom left corner of the keyboard. The special function-key (Fn) is on its right side. On Lenovo-notebooks this is interchanged. A lot of user with multiple notebooks don’t like this so you can revert the order with this fix. You can choose this by using the other BIOS-update-files (which you find in the ZIP-package). I did it and after getting used to it for a while it is now more pleasant to have the same behaviour on all keyboards.

Benchmarks

Sadly, I don’t have a picture of the benchmark I did before applying the BIOS-update. That’s why I can only supply a comparison-benchmark (in ChrystalDiskMark) between an ordinary SATA-HDD and an SSD-HDD. The sequentiall read-speed before the BIOS-update was around 130 MB/s.

Ordinary SATA-Festplatte in IDE-mode:

Corsair CSSD-F120GB2 after BIOS-update in AHCI-mode:

What is the problem?

Windows 7 offers the option to optimize folders for certain media-types like pictures, videos or music. Therefore it renders a preview of every file and gathers metadata of them which takes a lot of time. Windows can automatically set this media-type of a folder e.g. if it finds a lot of mp3′s inside it, it can become a music-folder.

I don’t care what the problem is, just tell me how to get rid of it!

Fixing this problem is easy. Just right-click the corresponding folder, select ‘Properties’, now click on the tab customize and select ‘General items’  like in the screenshot below.
If you never want to deal with the problem again, you can set the folder type for the whole drive like mentioned above and check ‘Apply template for all sub-folder’ (or whatever it is called in the English version).

Loading still never finishes…

If that problem occurs, kill your explorer.exe and check whether there are WAV-files inside the folder which hangs. There occurs a bug when Explorer tries to read corrupted WAV-files, which causes an infinite loop. Microsoft released a quick-fix for users experiencing this problem in december 2009, but it never worked for me so don’t bother. Your best bet is to re-encode the files (so that they aren’t corrupted anymore) or *my advice* turn them into FLAC-files, a losless audio-codec, which will make the files most times 50% smaller while maintaining their full quality.

The names of the options in the description may be wrong, since I did this with the German version and only translated them on my own.

1. Click on ‘Preferences’, then the tab ‘Account and Import’! Then click on ‘Send e-mail from another adress’

   

2. Another window pops up. You can add another adress in GMail you may use as the sending adress. You can assign a custom signature to every sending-adress and here comes the clue. You can’t add your own mail-adress twice, but you can alter it a little bit. Add a + after the first part of the adress (before the @) and a letter or word after it as in the picture below. It will still land in your inbox but GMail accepts it as another sending-adress.UPDATE: Cashy just added that you can use a dot instead of the + which makes this solution a lot more appealing.

   Keep in mind though that the sender will also see the attachment when receiving your e-mail. Alternatively you can of course register another different mail-adress instead.

   

3. Click on “Next Step”! Now check your inbox and click on the confirmation link in mail you just got
4. Go to ‘Preferences’ > ‘General’ and add the signature for your new sending-adress



5. Everytime you write a mail you can now choose the sender and therefore the signature.

   

There were some people in the Jumplist-Launcher comments wondering why they could only see 30 Jumplist-items although they set the maximum number to 60. Its time to shed some light on that matter. Therefore I created a Jumplist with 60 items and tested how many of them are displayed in a lot of different screen-resolutions. Here are the results:

Facts

• Every title of a group is counted as one item
• Every file, folder, shortcut can only be once inside a Jumplist
• the total count is the sum of normal and pinned items
• I didn’t consider the first title and both items at the bottom, because every Jumplist contains them

Results

If you divide each screen-height with the number of Jumplist-items and take the average value of these, you come to the conclusion that there is Jumplist-item for every 30 pixel. However you should take this with a grain of salt, because this result doesn’t match for very little and very big screen heights. There is no direct proportionality.

So…what do we get from this?

Everytime someone asks I can refer him to this blog-entry. I’m also considering to include a hint displaying how many Jumplist-items are possible at the current screen height in a future version of the Jumplist-Launcher.

May I help?

I’d be glad if you could test the max. number of jumplist-items for other screen-heights than those I’ve tested.

The program replaces only the explorer for the current user.

Important note: You can still bring up the taskmanager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and start the Explorer manually

Special thanks to Monika.mhz for pointing out the replacement-method used by this program.

Download

Requirements

Windows XP/Vista/7 (32- & 64 bit)
.NET Framework 3.5 (is already installed on Windows 7)