Archive for May, 2009
Thinkpad On Screen Display Fix
Thinkpad On Screen Display
I love the Thinkpad line of notebooks, formerly sold by IBM, though now via Lenovo of China. Currently I’m using a T61 laptop. Though it came with Vista, I downgraded it to XP and have had few problems in a year of use. Likewise, it runs decently on Linux (Ubuntu), though my laptop was upgraded to a discrete graphics card from NVidia – the Quadro NVS 140.
Unfortunately, I accidentally downloaded an update to the NVidia card via Windows Update. Big Mistake, as it is better to only use provided updates from Lenovo as some of their components are, I suppose, customized for their laptops. Either way, I lost my on screen display notifications for both brightness and volume. The volume display itself is actually kinda important as the speakers on my laptop are already extremely weak; sometimes I can’t even hear poorly encoded videos from YouTube with the volume maxed out.
I did a Google search and came up empty handed. Only a few days later did I find a post on the Lenovo forums that explained a fix. This may or may not work if you’re having the same problem, but it is worth a try. In my specific case, after upgrading all drivers relating to video, power management, hotkeys, etc, I was actually able to see a very small on screen display on the bottom of my screen when using the special function keys to change volume/brightness. And I also noticed that the latest upgrades put a special On Screen Display configuration tab within the advanced properties of my video display (Right Click Desktop -> Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> On Screen Display). Unfortunately, the size setting is buggy, and will hopefully be fixed by Lenovo soon
In the meantime, you might have success using the following registry fix.
Editing the Registry to fix the On Screen Display
- Open up the registry editor by hitting Windows Key + R and typing regedit
- Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
- Click on Software
- Click on IBM
- Click on TPHOTKEY
- Choose OnScreenDisplay
- Double Click the Size value
- Change the hex key to the following:
0000 14 1E 28 14 - Hit Okay, close Regedit and reboot your machine.
Hopefully your Thinkpad’s On Screen Display is working again. Also, I don’t even mess with the previously mentioned On Screen Display settings via the display manager. Might be wise to lay off of it until Lenovo puts out a patched upgrade!
Ctrl-Z Keyboard Shortcut in VMware
Go ahead and search Google using the keywords Ctrl-z vmware and you’ll get back a few pages of similar complaints regarding this awful choice of a keyboard shortcut.
Vmware has many useful shortcuts that allow one to quickly switch context between the host OS and the guest OS running in the VM. Ctrl-G and Ctrl-alt are the most important combos, as they change the keyboard context into the guest OS and return it back to the Host OS in the order listed. However, another one of VMware’s keyboard combos is Ctrl-Z, which is the suspend function that immediately causes the guest operating to, uh…, suspend immediately and shut down.
The Problem with Ctrl-Z
Accidentally hitting Ctrl-z
Ctrl-Z is, unfortunately, also a significant shortcut in both Windows and Linux. In Windows and Linux Guis, Ctrl-z is mapped to the undo function. Even worse, under the Linux console, Ctrl-Z is mapped to the actual suspend foreground app function. Personally, I run Windows XP on my laptop, with a VMware provided Linux console as an application. I’ll often Alt-tab between apps, and stop on the VMware Linux app. Of course, many times I forget to forward the keyboard context into Linux (using the previously mentioned Ctrl-g shortcut). If I then hit a Ctrl-z, attempting to suspend the current process running in the Linux terminal, I instead suspend the whole damn Virtual Machine, which can take anywhere from 10-15 seconds. I then get to restart the whole Linux guest, which takes me another 30 seconds or so.
From the Google results mentioned previously, or more exactly, a question posed on Stackoverflow.com, it seems the only way to fix this is via a significantly complicated hack:
You could use a resource editor on vmware.exe to remove the keybinding for ctrl-z. Obviously not for the faint of heart.
Anyway, if you’re listening Vmware execs and developers: Change this shortcut or at least provide an easy way to disable it!