removing rescue and recovery even if it doesn't appear in normal uninstall area

I loathe rescue and recovery. I've yet to find a place where I needed it, so I remove it. but occasionally, it's not in add/remove programs or whatever the equivalent is called in Vista/7. I read in a forum that you can also run the installer - which will allow you to uninstall.

The installer should be located in:

c:\swtools\apps\rnr

I haven't tested it yet, but just in case it works . . .

XP downgrade process for Thinkpad T61

The ThinkPad T61 downgrade process isn't entirely clear, but here's the easy way to do it . . .

In my case, I received 8 CDs from Lenovo/IBM. Six were labeled as recovery CDs, one a supplemental CD, and one was a "rescue and recovery" CD.

I was able to do the downgrade from Vista to XP by this process:

Put in rescue and recovery CD (not disc 1 of 6)

Hold down F12 on bootup (this gets you the boot options screen)

Boot to the CD

From the rescue and recovery manu, choose "restore your system"

choose "restore my hard drive to the original factory state"

choose "I do not want to save any files"

Choose all the obvious options

It'll ask for each of your six CDs, and that's it. It takes forever, but it works.

Rescue and Recovery takes up huge amounts of room on Lenovos

I'm working with a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 right now. It has a 68 GB hard drive with only 5 GB free. After some investigation, I found a folder called RRBackups was taking up 22+ GB of space. It's supposed to be some kind of baller additional backup program. Well, I have my own backup scheme, I don't need this one. So I uninstalled it, rebooted, and then deleted the RRBackups folder and voila - there is now 27 GB free on the drive.

WLAN driver causes BSOD only on WPA network

I ran into something very strange today. I had a ThinkPad T41 that was getting intermittent blue screens of death. I ran hardware diagnostics, and they all came up with no problems. To make a long story short, I took it home and reformatted it. No more BSODs. Then I brought it back to my client's office, and I got a BSOD every time I booted up the computer - just after I logged in.

It seemed that whenever the wireless LAN card saw a WPA encrypted network (not even connecting to it - just seeing it), it would give this BSOD - about IRQ_less_or_equal (or something like that). I had to disable the WLAN card with the hardware switch (in this case Fn + F5). Then everything worked fine. In the end, I upgraded the driver for the Intel Pro 2100 3B driver (I think that was the model or something close to it). And after that, all was normal. Very strange.