My wife has a supposedly very nice Lenovo t410s (company) laptop. High end super duper 64 bit machine with loads of RAM. At least on paper.
First issue: when she got it, it came with Windows XP pre-installed.. WTF? So, installing Windows 7 upgrade immediately. Via a download service. Which downloaded a disk image. That had to be burned on DVD to be installed. Eh.. But in a clean WinXP install, there's no way to burn a DVD.
So, downloading again through my trusty Macbook Pro. And burn the image.
Back to the laptop. Install win7 update.
uhm, ok, lots of drivers missing/not working. Including the network driver…...
Go to the website using my Mac again. Download the images. put them on a USB stick and install on laptop.
Great. it Works! Let it rip through all the Microsoft updates that are pushed and it should be done, right?
Wrong. First thing: Wife needs Citrix client. Simple enough to install. Okay, That was easy. And it works too!
However, after some time she noticed that her cursor jumped around a lot. First blaming it to herself accidentally touching the touchpad, but even after disabling the touch to click, the cursor still jumped around.
Today she had enough and asked me to check. Long live the googles and bings, and I found the problem. Guess we were not the only one.
Okay, so we need a BIOS update and a Ultrawhatever driver update. First the BIOS update. Reboot. Of course, I get that.. Driver is next. Reboot again. Sigh. Obvious, it's Windows, right.
Seems to work, wait, there are more Windows updates. Install as well. Do you want to install IE9? sure, why not.
Reboot. (did you think anything else??)
Fire up IE and go to the universities citrix portal to logon. Oh wait, Citrix receiver must be installed? Okay, install. "The components are already installed".. yeah, I know, so just work, dammit!
Seems that IE9 is incompatible with the Citrix client? Back to IE8 then.. disable windows component IE9.. Reboot AGAIN.
Eh wait.. Now there's no IE at all? Hangon.. Back to Google.. ah.. I need to uninstall IE9 completely, not just disable it… ok.. Uninstall.. guess what… Reboot!
Ah, now it works, IE8 is available again and works with the Citrix receiver.
1 hour of my life, wasted.
FWIW, I installed Safari as default browser on the Lenovo, but somehow the uni portal + citrix won't work with Safari, so IE is unfortunately a must…
Sigh.. these things just confirm again why I switched to Mac in 2001.. I never want to get back… ever..