Introducing Lenovo Solution Center (LSC)

[nkull]

So, Power Manager and the other apps are NOT apart of TVT then right?    Sorry, just wasnt quite clear

[BMGRAHAM]

It isn't supported on the W510 and now I can't install Lenovo Thinkvantage toolbox because it's no longer supported.  So now my IBM supplied laptop no longer has a diagnostics tool.

[nkull]

I believe that there are some links on some other forums for downloading the old ThinkVantage tool box... I will say that on my new X220 it has the new software, and it is crap in comparison.  I'm getting a bit annoyed by the Adobe Air dependencies, and the diagnostics are not near as good... Little things like the icon on the task bar not working when you run with small icons like I do also annoy me.  The ThinkVantage Toolbox by PC Doctor was a great value-add to the ThinkPad line IMO.   

2012 is proving to be a bad year of changes for ThinkPad, although obviously peoples opinions differ on the changes being made

[dudley]

I'm annoyed with the subpar performance and idiosyncransies of LSC
such as.
-Why do I have to launch simpletap to launch LSC.exe?
-When I receive an alert message on the task bar and click it, after simple tap takes over my wholescreen why do I still have to click on the LSC issue to launch the program, didn't I already click on the message?
-Why do I even need to install SimpleTap to use LSC anyway?
-When I right click the taskbar of LSC why do I only get the optionimple Tap. When I can simply left click and get the same effect? What happened to the list of modules that TVT shows when you right click it?
-On 1st of July 2012, I did a backup to external hdd. I have both TVT and LSC installed. On my windows my system date is dd/mm/yyyy, thus 1/7/2012. TVT reports that my backup is sucessful and will remind me again next month, whereas LSC reports that my backup is outdated by 6 months! I think it's because LSC reports the date as mm/dd/yyyy. as in 1/7/2012 on my system clock is in LSC january 7th 2012!!
-What happened to the complete diagnostic tools of TVT? from CPU to bus to GPU to memory. why does LSC only have HDD and mem test? If that's the case, I might as well install pcmark or speccy and skip LSC all together. 
-As for the UI, why waste space with super big icons and tabs and the 3 crazy big meters that does the same thing as the little ticks and Xs on the modules.

Please Lenovo, don't discontinue TVT until LSC is ready for launch. If it's already too late for TVT, please get your act together and make LSC at least at par with TVT.

[someotherguy]

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dudley wrote:

I'm annoyed with the subpar performance and idiosyncransies of LSC
such as.
-Why do I have to launch simpletap to launch LSC.exe?
-When I receive an alert message on the task bar and click it, after simple tap takes over my wholescreen why do I still have to click on the LSC issue to launch the program, didn't I already click on the message?
-Why do I even need to install SimpleTap to use LSC anyway?
-When I right click the taskbar of LSC why do I only get the optionimple Tap. When I can simply left click and get the same effect? What happened to the list of modules that TVT shows when you right click it?
-On 1st of July 2012, I did a backup to external hdd. I have both TVT and LSC installed. On my windows my system date is dd/mm/yyyy, thus 1/7/2012. TVT reports that my backup is sucessful and will remind me again next month, whereas LSC reports that my backup is outdated by 6 months! I think it's because LSC reports the date as mm/dd/yyyy. as in 1/7/2012 on my system clock is in LSC january 7th 2012!!
-What happened to the complete diagnostic tools of TVT? from CPU to bus to GPU to memory. why does LSC only have HDD and mem test? If that's the case, I might as well install pcmark or speccy and skip LSC all together. 
-As for the UI, why waste space with super big icons and tabs and the 3 crazy big meters that does the same thing as the little ticks and Xs on the modules.

Please Lenovo, don't discontinue TVT until LSC is ready for launch. If it's already too late for TVT, please get your act together and make LSC at least at par with TVT.

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dudley,

Thanks for this feedback, I really appreciate it.  Your first 4 points have to do with the integration between LSC and SimpleTap which I agree was badly designed.  Fortunately there are a couple ways of dealing with this:

1.  if you don't use/want SimpleTap, uninstall it.  Then the toolbar will just launch LSC like you want it to.  

2.  if you do use/want SimpleTap, but want the toolbar to launch LSC directly, then you can delete the LSC tile within SimpleTap.  Right-click on it and then choose the trash button.

Your point about the dates is a bug and I have reported it to the LSC team.

Your point about missing diags compared to ThinkVantage Toolbox is valid.  The LSC team is still working on new diags and you'll see them roll out over the months ahead.

[Josh_Tckf]

Does anyone else have User Account Control pop up with "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes on this computer" when they start LSC.exe by clicking on the Toolbar icon?  It's been doing this to me ever since I first installed it on June 9th, even though I am the administrative user - the only user - on this machine.  (Possibly relevant:  I have never installed SimpleTap.)

Thanks for any help you can give

[someotherguy]

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Josh_Tckf wrote: 

Does anyone else have User Account Control pop up with "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes on this computer" when they start LSC.exe by clicking on the Toolbar icon?  

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Yes - that's how LSC works.  It has to run with admin privileges.  Just because you're an admin user in Win7 doesn't mean that everything runs with admin privileges - that's what the UAC prompt is for.

A future version of LSC won't require admin privileges to launch, but I don't have a timeline for when that version will be released.

[PatrickVDV]

I install successfully LSC on my computer but it always tell me that I should update both Windows and System Update when I set up as automatic update, when I verify it's always telling me no update available, these messages are very boring and I am thinking to uninstall the LSC, could somebody help me?

[EricThorniley]

I loaded LSC on a W500 running Windows 7 64 bit to replace LTT which I had removed to investigate another issue. There is rather a lot of stuff on this machine.

LSC adds 7 minutes to the boot time by triggering 775 calls to the MsiInstaller (the event 1035 issue noted elsewhere.)  These calls trigger the installer to reconfigure each of the installed other products (but without actually changing them) thus locking them. If a service tries to start whilst LSC has locked one of its components (like the Microsoft VC++ libraries), it will probably crash. So after the 7 minute delay I have to go restarting missing services. However as the service was forced to crash by LSC in an unexpected way, it may already have grabbed system resources (like network ports) and locked them but then be unable to release them. Then it cannot start at all until I reboot the machine.

This is the most destructive piece of code I have ever loaded on a machine. I can't see that the issue is with the now unsupported W500 hardware, because the problem is with the interaction between LSC and WMI.

This product has one really good point - the uninstaller works.

I was not a great fan of the PC-Doctor version, but now I realise just how functional, useful and competent it was.

This is not good for Lenovo's reputation. Maybe my next laptop will not be a Lenovo.

[Djembe]

LSC was reporting that my printer was disabled in Device Manager. I was surprised that it was even in Device Manager, since I only use it wirelessly networked, so I got rid of it from Device Manager and everything looks fine there. Now the printer continues to work fine, but LSC is saying that it is disabled in Device Manager. It isn't - it's been removed, not disabled. Is there any way to get LSC to stop reporting this as an issue?