Just applied the latest update to the HotKey manager, and noticed a pleasant change: instead of the previous bright green on-screen display, you now get an elegant black & white display for volume, brightness and Thinklight.

Graphics are anti-aliased, and the OSD fades out instead of just disappearing.

It seems much more Thinkpad-like, and is much more visible. Not mentioned in the changelog, as far as I can tell. Came as a pleasant surprise.

I like it too.

Lenovo seems to gradually redesign the ThinkVantage UI. The new Power Manager and Access Connections UI, new battery and network gauges on the taskbar and finally the hotkeys OSD. I welcome these changes as long as they don't sacrifice the performance which unfortunately is the case for Power Manager UI.

The new hotkeys OSD design is nice and matches much better the Vista/7 design which is a good thing now that we finally move away from 2000/XP era.

In Winodws 7, you can change the color of the OSD if you so desire by going to the control panel, display, adjust screen resolution, advanced settings link and finally selecting the OSD tab in the video adapter box. I set mine to red to match the TrackPoint.

I think the traditional green color of the indicators came from the fact that all ThinkPad indicators (LEDs) are green.

Works in XP as well.

It's nice. I like it. And thanks to user "yak" for the tip on how to change the display colors.

You're welcome but it wasn't me, it was ARD .

I like the new look as it has a much more modern look and feel.

Shame, however, that they forgot to change the number lock indicator. That's still the old style green indicator and looks really naff and out of place compared to the new indicators.

http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6250/indicators.jpg
This?

Yep. (Although the scroll lock indicator doesn't show on my external ThinkPad keyboard... and come to think of it why do the stupid Windows caps lock/scoll lock/number lock text indicators still display? C'mon... attention to detail Lenovo. )

I like the new design so much that I actually have downloaded and installed it
The new black look is really good, and in the past I was very reluctant to sacrifice even a few MB of RAM for an app that just hangs there and does nothing more than display hideous-looking green stripes that look like something out of Win95 years...

Really nice to see Yamato software team get their act together and update the thing. Even better of they had made it 5 years ago... BTW, let me remind that you can reprogram the blue Thinkvantage button to something useful (use search)

Depends on the ThinkPad. Pretty sure that the hard drive access light on my 570 is yellow/red-ish. Then again, it's also unlike a modern ThinkPad in the lack of a blue Enter key.

+1 for the new OSD. And I have set the middle bar to the good old poison green

I like it fine.

I was surprised to find out that it now includes what used to be the Lenovo Interface Driver for Vista and Windows 7. I just had to reinstall Windows 7 a couple of days ago due to a failed hard drive and the Lenovo Interface Driver was nowhere to be seen. A search on Lenovo's site pulled it up for a couple of model laptops, but the majority do not need it with the new Hotkey Features driver.

I think, the System Interface Driver is still present, but it is now included in the driver package of the Hotkey/OSD driver. It is still listed under "Uninstall or change a program" in Windows 7 as a separate program.

Where can i get this?

Seems so.

The 'permanent' Caps Lock indicator just showed up on my X100e today. Rebooting didn't help. It also looked like it was reporting the status in reverse, Caps Lock On when it was off and vice-versa.

So I started the Task Manager and noticed TpNumLkD running so I decided to kill it and the on-screen display disappeared so it seems that this Num Lock thing is involved. I then found TpNumLkD.exe in \Program Files\Lenovo\HOTKEY (along with TpNumLk.exe) so I manually ran it and now the on-screen display appears to be working normally. When I hit Caps Lock the indicator comes on (but without the CAPS LOCK ON works) and stays until I hit Caps Lock again and the icon appears with a slash through it for a few seconds and then disappears.

I just tested this through a reboot, and the problem still exists. I redid the work-around and am good until the next reboot. It would be nice to know why this started and how to REALLY fix it. For some reason Bluetoot Service is also running even though I don't have any hardware that requires it.

TpNumLkD.exe is Version 1.11

Jack

A minor correction to the original post - it's not anti-aliased, the rounded corners are cleary jagged, not smoothed.