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IBM Tech Support

The IBM technical support web site lets you sign up and set up a profile of your email address and all the IBM computers you own so that they show you only relevant information for your machine(s). Great. At first I was set up for one PC. In December 1999, I went to modify my profile and it detected that I was using Netscape Navigator v3.01c. Not true. I was using Internet Explorer version 5 at the time. For a company with an Internet strategy as important to them as IBM.... 

IBM does a good job of keeping users informed about updates to drivers. At least with ThinkPad drivers, they seem to do a good job of fixing bugs and keeping them reasonably current. However, the installation instructions for the drivers are pretty much wrong every time. Figuring out the right thing to do based on the given instructions is akin to mind reading. 

For example, around the end of July, 2000, they notified me of an upgrade to the IDE driver for my ThinkPad. The document id describing this is  DSHY-3TZP3T. It was last modified:  2000-07-25. Below are the install instructions for Windows NT4:

1. Start Window NT 4.0,
    log on with the user ID authorized as an administrator.
2. Double click on SCSI Adapters in Control Panel.
  If you find the following drivers from Drivers tab,remove them.
  Intel PIIX PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
  IDE CD-ROM(Atapi 1.2)/Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
3. Click Add....
4. Click Have Disk... in Install Driver screen.
5. Specify the correct path.
   (If some INF selection menu comes, select OEMSETUP.INF.)
6. Select the correct driver, and click OK.
   The driver you have to select is as follows.
   ThinkPad PIIX IDE Driver:
    for ThinkPad 760E/760X/765 family and 365X family
   ThinkPad PIIX4 IDE Driver:
    for ThinkPad 770 family, 600 family, 570 family, 560X family
    and A20m, A20p, and T20.
7. Restart the computer.

The problems with this were: 

• The installation instructions omit the fact that you have to run the downloaded EXE file to unpack it before you start the driver installation. Never mind the fact that when you unpack the drivers, you'll get an error message if you ever unpacked any of the older versions of the driver. 
• The instructions tell you to remove the older IDE driver, but only if it was one of two IDE drivers listed. In my case, the listed driver was not one of these two. It turns out I should have removed it anyway. My old driver was "ThinkPad PIIX4 IDE Driver". By not removing it, the software later objected to the fact that there were already drivers installed and asked me what to do. Beats me. 
• The instructions don't tell you that to add a driver, you first have to be on the Drivers tab, not the Devices tab in the SCSI adapters section of the Control Panel. 
• After clicking on the Have Disk button, you are told to specify the correct path. What path? 
• This is not English: (If some INF selection menu comes, select OEMSETUP.INF) 

Needless to say, the IDE driver for the hard disk in a computer is important and mistakes installing it can be fatal. Because IBM can not be trusted to write installation instructions that are correct, I suggest making full disk backups using a product such as Drive Image from PowerQuest or Ghost from Symantec. 

Unfortunately, this is the rule, rather than the exception.