Wow, I am in the home strecth of a clean install on my W500 Thinkpad and it sure has been a headache. I have never experienced this much of a pain. I did a 64bit Vista installation (not provided by Lenovo). The operating system install went as expected, but then it became fun. Getting the drivers collected was a pain in the ass. Once you download everything you think you are going to need, you need to run an installer to extract the files.
Would it be too much trouble for Lenovo to append the file names with the device they are for? I am sorry, but I just don't know what 7vrv17ww.exe is for! Would 7vrv17ww-IntelProLanAdapter.exe be too much to ask for? Or instead of extracting to: c:\drivers\vista\something and c:\drivers\win\something why not c:\drivers\device\os\? It seems that would be easy to do and more helpful! After getting all of my drivers collected and extracted I began the process of installing them. Some with installers, some without. That went ok until I got to the last 6 items in device manager. System base device, PCI device, etc. In the end, I got all the drivers loaded and all of the hardware seemed to be working ok. All of these driver problems could have been avoided if system update worked; however, since I had a warranty replacement of my system board system update has not functioned. I believe it is a problem with the bios not reporint the correct model / serial number; however, I have not had a chance to bring it in to be resolved.
Then...bluescreen. Thank you ATI driver. In the end, i discovered the Lenovo driver has some known issues. You must use the ATI driver; however, the installer will not install the correct driver. Instead you need to manually install the driver. Update driver through device manager and point to the driver from your download from the ATI website. Pain in the ass.
Now to reload all my software. That should only take a couple days! Hopefully, the reality is it will be a day of straight installing and 2 weeks of discovering things I forgot.