Chris A. Brandlehner BLOG - Category : Hardware

Annoying Scroll-Lock indicator popup on Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 7

Christian Brandlehner — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200

On a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 I had an annoying problem with a popup indicating if the Scoll-Lock key was pressed. That tiny little grey window was popping up in the lower right corner of the screen.
The reason for hating that popus is that in Flightsimulator X the Scroll-Lock key is used to open the ATC window. If you play in DirectX fullscreen mode the screen flickers heavily for several seconds.
I found that the indator is not a Thinkpad feature but part of the Widcomm Bluetooth Stack. No idea why that software is doing this kind of stuff but here is the trick how to disable that indicator popup:
Use your registry editor and change the DWORD for KeyIndication in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Widcomm\BTConfig\General to a value 0. To reenable restore the default value of 1.

A Thinkpad X40 lost it's serial number

Christian Brandlehner — Tue, 8 Aug 2006 18:53:57 +0200

I had a problem with an IBM Thinkpad X40 not displaying it Serial Number, Machine Type and UUID. While you can ignore it when these informations are missing in the BIOS, there are other aspects. I found that the automatic software update feature does not work as well as some software products bundled with the Thinkpad as they will run on Thinkpads only.
I contacted the IBM hardware support and because of a three year onsite support contract an IBM specialist visited me to fix the problem. He had a special floppy disk with a program he used to flash the missing information into an EEPROM on the systems mainboard. Before you ask: This program is not available for download, you have to contact IBM hardware support if you face that problem too.

Affordable AGP graphic card plus mainboard

Christian Brandlehner — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:16:25 +0200

I was looking around for additional hardware to upgrade my current PC without the need to replace almost everything. I came along these fine products which allow me to reuse my "old" Intel Pentium 4-2 GHz and the installed memory (768MB).

Upgrading my old Desktop PC

Christian Brandlehner — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:34:12 +0200

I am going to upgrade my old Desktop PC as I have just one slow disk. I am afraid of loosing all my data on that disk so I am going to buy two of these fine disks and a RAID controller: