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!
#1 by Steve Portigal - June 18th, 2009 at 11:33
Interesting, I just noticed a few days ago that my on screen display went away (Lenovo X61, XP Pro) – don’t know when or why or how. I have the same settings in display properties and on-screen is enabled. And my registry settings are already what you suggest.
So I’m definitely confused as to what happened. Keeping Lenovo’s own set of patches up to date is a definite challenge, they seem to like to mess up Windows/the hardware in their own particular way.
#2 by admin - June 21st, 2009 at 11:36
I’ve also found that the Windows Update versions of hardware drivers are not always compatible with Lenovo’s hardware. This seems especially true with video (Nvidia, ATI, Intel) drivers. Don’t let Windows auto update these.
What I’d do is go to Lenova’s website, and download all the drivers and utilities that have anything to do with power management, acpi, sound, keyboard, and video. Make sure your bios is running the latest version and that you have the latest edition of the
‘On Screen Display’ app, which has a little green icon.
You can see which version of the app is currently installed in the Add/Remove programs app that is in the Control Panel.
Try to reinstall all the apps and drivers. If that doesn’t work, the Lenovo forums are pretty good, though the employees themselves aren’t really helpful.
If that doesn’t work, wait a week or two, and then check the Lenovo site for new versions of drivers. It has been my experience that they often put out patches that break related functionality. I’d really wish they’d get their Auto Update feature working again.
Not real happy with Lenovos support these days…
#3 by Dan - November 16th, 2009 at 12:40
thanks for the registry edit. it seemed to work for me in windows 7. i had to do the edit and then turn on the on-screen display in the video settings. then it worked fine.