New laptop!

Lenovos are always a good choice. Until a few months ago I had a Thinkpad T400 with switchable graphics (HD3470), a core 2 T9600 and 8GB of RAM.. very solid machine that sat on the shelf for about 4 months before someone who actually knew what they were looking at bought it from me for $1200. When I got it, it had Vista ultimate and XP, and at idle, ran 94 processes. I wiped the HDD, doubled the memory, installed 7 ultimate from an upgrade disk and tweaked it till I figured out that all it needed from the lenovo site was the fingerprint reader software, the power management, the ultranav driver, and the switchable graphics driver to have the best of the functions it had in vista, but I cut the number of running processes in half.

boohbah said:

You also need to teach her how to turn off WiFi as it will scan for available networks and connect on its own.

we discovered a switch that kills wifi /network connections and has a led indicator that lets you know whether its on or off.
we also learned to disable the trackpad when using the mouse the cursor would jump into different lines making you type nonsense and half sentences.
we christened it Yoda speak.

Sounds like you are getting there. :) Glad to know it has a LED for her. Keeps it simple. Have you decided to do a clean install? Have you downloaded all the drivers you may need? I realize the HDD is not that big, but are you going to make a second partition for things like images, drivers and stuff? Mine came with a 500GB and I split it in half so I could run VMware Player on it with Server 2003 for my class. I store my images there along with updated drivers too.

Need the exact model number off the sticker on bottom. All I see in OP is G series.

Was there a box to insert tag number too? That gets even more specific drivers.

boohbah said:

we decided to keep some of the bloat ware , as you say its required and things like the Veriface feature we like .

You should be able to locate everything it needs. My webcam files, backllit keyboard, everything I need is located on, in my case, Dell's site. So don't let that stop you. The facial recognition software for Yoda speak should be a separate download as well. A clean install, IMO is really the best way to go.

Oh and btw, I read one of the other posts here about defragging. Laptops need to be defragged more frequently.

Helpful Links:

User Forum for G555
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/forums/s...message?q=g555

Using Smart Downloading Driver Update

Go To Smart Downloading Driver page (http://consumersupport.lenovo.com/sm...x.html?Lang=en)
Enter the machine's serial number
Click next
The system will then install the "Smart Downloading" software into your IdeaPad.
Lenovo Support page

Go to Lenovo Support page (http://consumersupport.lenovo.com/us...s/drivers.html)
Enter your machine serial number and click "search" or choose "Brand" and "Family" then click continue
It will then automatically bring you to the drivers page for your IdeaPad.

I wouldn't go so far as to say laptops need to be defragged more often. Most people either rarely or never defrag their computers, or they do it way too often, and end up wondering why their HDD failed prematurely.

If it hasn't slowed down noticeably since the last time a program was installed or uninstalled, it doesn't need to be defragged.