> For Lenovo laptops, by contrast, you have to somehow know exactly what components are used in your laptop and then go hunt for those drivers. (And no, I don't want to use Lenovo's mysterious automatic update tools.)

Biased IBM supporter here. All IBM/Lenovo Think systems have a MachineType-Model (eg: 2537-25A). It's written on the button of Thinkpads, or you can find it by:

Windows: GUI: msinfo32, CLI: systeminfo Linux: dmidecode -t 1

The only possible exception, I can think of, is if you order a custom configuration - then the model part will say 'CTO'.

Source: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/Pro...