Lenovo "gaming" laptops not fit for gaming

Sad to say I've tried everything, and now I'm afraid I'm left with no choice but to buy a new rig.

For years, I had a great 17" MSI laptop, thin, steel series keyboard, an amazing rig. Sadly my young child had an encounter with the cord, and then the MSI met the floor - no more.

I then saw Lenovo advertising "gaming" laptops, and based on my prior experience with them for productivity, thought I'd roll the dice on one of their mid-tier 15" models, the Y700-15ISK.

While advertised as a gaming rig, it's fatally flawed in the design. It has a small SSD, and a large HDD. In Lenovo's wisdom, they made the SSD the system drive, and left the large HDD for apps.

The problem is, the HDD is a WD "green" drive (why they'd put that in a gaming laptop is beyond me). It spins down to conserve energy. Great for the planet, environmentally-conscious, less wear-n-tear on the drive? I don't care. Fail for gaming. Absolute fail.

After literally hours, I've tracked the chronic lag (1-3 seconds while gaming, regardless of game, in spurts, never ending) to the WD HD. Whenever an app has to access a sound or image that it hasn't buffered, the drive has to spin back up, resulting in a delay. Not a big deal if you're playing solitaire, if you're playing MWO, you've just walked into/stood in enemy fire - goodbye.

I have tried almost everything. I say almost because pulling the crap WD drive out and replacing it voids the warranty - and Lenovo's warranty department is a mess as it, but that's another issue.

I tried patches, diagnostics, bios upgrades, even installing a 3rd party legacy program that tricked the HDD by keeping it spinning, but it did not eliminate the issue.

I will likely place this on a desk (it's great for word processing, web browsing, etc., just not gaming), and get a new rig for multipurpose activities. I am writing this to keep others from wasting the money and hours that I did. Lenovo designed this unplayable rig, and marketed it as a "gaming" one. That's what I'm upset about. They also won't admit the mistake, offer any remedy, and continue to market it. I want to save anyone else the grief I encountered.

Lenovo needs to stay in the productivity business, and out of the gaming business. Unless they're going to make right by the customers they've hosed over with this current farce, and put some genuine (not budget-minded) engineering into actual gaming systems, I'll never look at them for gaming again.

 

They won't know if you don't tell. Just get an SSD and clean install Windows; noone in their right mind uses HDD as main drive in 2018.

 

This is the situation for literally any laptop using an 5400RPM 2.5" HDD as a main boot drive. Not really a problem with Lenovo laptops...

 

So the issue is the HDD and not the laptop?

...


What?





You are the customer, you are always right.

What they don't know won't harm them.



On the other hand, if you want something that can survive falls, the old thonkpads will do it.

 

Generally the idea behind small SSD and large HDD is -- SSD is for system and apps and HDD is for data/media. Your problem is easily fixable. Buy an SSD that is large enough to hold the games you are actively playing (512GB should be plenty for most people). I end up doing this on most laptop since it is usually cheaper to buy a laptop with a small/cheap SSD or HDD and upgrade it yourself. Most manufacturers will not void warranty oh a HDD or SSD replacement.