
We broke the news of System Update’s demise back in April. Our dear readers left comments lamenting the loss of System Update, as did many forum-goers around the world.
Lenovo did not turn a blind eye to this and today has announced that System Update has returned. Check out the announcement below and hit the link below for some more commentary from Lenovo and its customers.
Recently, Lenovo announced that we were changing the way we handled system updates going forward. Basically, we were discontinuing ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) for individual use and directing those customers to our public support site for driver and BIOS updates. Never removed was the ability for business customers in managed environments to access, download to their network, and then apply these updates as required.
There were several business reasons for this change. Regular scheduled update requests were being sent to the Lenovo servers with the subsequent downloading causing very high traffic – yielding performance issues and, in cases, causing a decline in the customer’s TVSU experience and confidence. Balancing the high cost of that already existing solution and the additional investment required to improve performance and reliability for our customers has been a difficult process and led to a more difficult decision which resulted in disabling of TVSU on April 1.
Following our announcement, however, we heard from many customers on our blogs and forums. We’ve heard clearly that our individual and business customers alike value TVSU highly. Therefore, we are adjusting course based on your feedback, and have released a new version of TVSU on May 31st. In addition, we have made some backend investments which should indeed improve system performance.
This version can be launched by the customer and it will find and install applicable updates for their system, as before. We also have a new tool, Message Center Plus, which we encourage you to download, as it provides a fast conduit to important advisory messages and helpful information about our products and services.We value our customers’ feedback, and we hope the deployment of this new version of TVSU proves that. Thanks for your partnership with us, and the loyalty you have shown to TVSU and the other services we provide to our customers.







And happy that I am, that it is back…
But it doesn’t work with Vista SP2 and it doesn’t work with Win 7. There is no word on when it will work with either of these, other than a comment by one of the admins on the Lenovo forum that they’re working on it. Mishandled at the start and mishandled at the end.
It’s about time! I was just on the verge of standardizing Mac’s at the office
They discontinued the service because it was so popular that they’d have to upgrade the servers? Then they figured out it was popular by reading forums instead of looking at the server logs? Don’t they realize they’re in the computer business and can add server capacity almost for free?
Where? Where?
I just went to the Lenovo website, downloaded the latest SU that I could find (3.14), and when I ran it it told me to check back after May when there would be a new exciting blah blah blah… Etc.
Hmmm…you might try uninstalling SU, rebooting, and installing the new version. I just installed a copy the other day, freshly downloaded, and it worked fine.
Regarding Windows 7, most of the drivers needed are installed by the Windows 7 installer. Beyond that, TVSU still recognizes Win7 as Vista and those available drivers and software add-ons are working fine for me.