ThinkPad Button

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The ThinkPad Button is a button situated in the upper left corner of the keyboard on modern ThinkPads. It is intended to be a means of quick access to help and support. Technically it is nothing else than a button that can be configured to launch a certain piece of software. While originally it was grey and labelled "ThinkPad", IBM later made it blue and called it the "Access IBM Button". Lenovo relabelled it as "ThinkVantage" after it took over the ThinkPad line from IBM.

System Boot

Pressing Access IBM at system boot can either launch the Predesktop Area (HPA) or the Rescue and Recovery partition. This depends on a specific setting of the BIOS Setup Utility and the availability of either a Host Protected Area or a bootable diagnostics partition. See the linked pages for details.

Linux support

Under Linux, the IBM ThinkPad(tm) special keys can be enabled using tpb.

I.e., to make pressing the Access IBM Button launch ntpctl, add the following line /etc/tpbrc file: 

THINKPAD    /usr/bin/X11/xterm -T ntpctl -e ntpctl

To make pressing the Access IBM Button launch the ThinkWiki homepage, add the following line: 

THINKPAD    /usr/bin/firefox http://www.thinkwiki.org

See the tpb page and the ThinkPad special keys HOWTO for more information.

Windows support (2000 or XP)

If you want to customize the program that is launched when the Access IBM button is pressed while the machine is running Windows (2000 or XP) you can change the following registry entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\IBM\TPHOTKEY\8001

Here are the default values: 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\IBM\TPHOTKEY\8001]
"File"="C:\\Program Files\\IBM\\Access IBM\\\\aibm.exe"
"DispName"="Access IBM"

Related Links

Models featuring this Technology

"ThinkPad" button

"Access IBM" button

"ThinkVantage" button

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