Lenovo W520 Owner's Thread

Now it's 1 CD and 4 DVD's.

 

Forgot to mention. They were so nice to approve it today. However, for some reason, it was $25.00 more but this did not bother me. Interestingly, the machine was in my car having the RMA and return label going to UPS on Monday and once I got the e-mail, I ran to the car and opened it with a smiley face To be honest, I would still have my fingers crossed till I see the refund. They said it takes 8 - 10 business days!

Seems like you recommend that I replace the HDD but you advise me to keep the HDD for backups. Knowing that I already have an external WD 1TB for backup, would this change your opinion?

Once more, thanks a lot for your help.

 

I made mine on 3 DVDs (though could be done on 2 DVDs and 1 CD) and the bot media ould be done on a CD too.

Does anyone recommend the idea of having the recovery on a 16GB flash drive just used for this purpose?

 

I would keep it unless you find someone willing to give you $100.

You can get an Ultrabay hard drive adaptor and use it for storage. You might use it for Windows 8. You might change your mind in a few months and sell your W520 and decide to ship as originally configured.

Welcome to the W520 Owners and Users club.

 

It has been like that for me.

I personally use USB flash drives of various sizes for convenience, like sharing a 6GB file with someone. Because the flash drives can be written/erased many times and for different intents, I use the DVDs for ThinkPad recovery.

If you really want to explore the USB flash drive possibility, read this.

 

New BIOS 1.36 posted:

Version 1.36 UEFI: 1.36 / ECP: 1.20
(Fix) Fixed an issue where the Serial ATA mode setting could not be changed by Windows WMI script.

BIOS Update Utility for Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), a (32-bit, 64-bit), XP - ThinkPad W520

Installed without any problem, but did not fix my 50 second warm-boot delay issue.

 

same here, i haven't noticed any changes so far, still have the warm boot delay

 

Will it make much difference buying the i7-2860QM instead of the i7-2760QM. The price difference is £240 in the UK

 

The performance advantage of the i7-2860QM is marginal to that of the i7-2760QM in terms of benchmarks (13th and 17th respectively at time of writing), it's not really worth it especially for a price difference of £240. I rather invest that elsewhere such as a SSD for instance.

 

For me, the major difference is in the cache 8MB vs 6MB. 6 MB is still large enough but some people like me love having more cache to expedite processing of commonly used data. Does it worth the monetary difference you stated? I would say No unless the dollars are not an issue for you.

 

I'm confused. I'm configuring a W520 to buy here Lenovo - Professional-grade Laptops| ThinkPad W Series | Mobile Workstations | Lenovo - United Kingdom(UK)

The CPU config has a i3-2370M at £900 extra. Is this an error\mistake by Lenovo?

 

Haha, yeah most likely it's a pricing mistake by Lenovo. Whoever pay £899 for a Core i3 processor would be bonkers...

 

After replacing my HDD with the 256GB SSD. I found that the total capacity of it in Windows is showing as 237GB. Is that normal?

 

Perfectly normal. (My 64GB SSD is shown as 59.5GB.)

 

The reason behind those numbers is the different conception of what a gigabyte is between the manufacturer of your HDD (10^9 bytes) and Microsoft(8^10 bytes) ( source).

 

I am a little disappointed with the trackpad gestures particularly the two-finger scrolling and the zooming. Any recommendations to improve that? Do you recommend any third-part software or may be just changes in current settings?

Thanks

 

Try two-finger-scroll - Two finger gestures for Synaptics TouchPads on Windows - Google Project Hosting

People swear by it. I'm a mouser.

 

Thanks. It is better though still little tricky as it runs either too fast or too slow (two-finger gesture). Do you recommend specific settings that I may try?

Thanks again

 

pchome, how long did it take for you to receive your laptop?

 

It's little complicated. I ordered two (one with 7200RPM ordered on Feb 1st and was supposed to ship 3/12 due to lack of stock but once the HDD is back in stock, I received it 5 days ago. I ordered one with 5400RPM on 2/16, received it 2/24 (super quick)!

 

Thors.Hammer: I forgot to wipe my 7200RPM drive before I replace it. I only have desktop at home. Can 2.5" HD be connected to my desktop so I can wipe it or do I need to purchase one of those cables that connect 2.5" through USB?

 

Even if you remembered to wipe that HDD clean, you wouldn't be able to because it was your system drive before you took it out of the primary bay. By the time you replaced it with the new SSD, installed Windows 7 on the SSD and ran your W520 off the SSD, that HDD was sitting on the desk, having no connection to anything.

I doubt that your desktop PC has both USB and eSATA ports. So, yes, you need one of those cable to connect the HDD to the W520: at this end, the eSATA connector provides electrical interface and the USB connector provides power; at the other end, the combined connector is plugged into the HDD.

 

Was the delay because of the 320gb 7200 rpm?

I hope i get mine as quick as your last one...

 

Do you have a Windows 7 install disk? If so, pull your SSD out of the machine and put the drive back in the primary drive bay. Power up the machine and boot from the DVD.

When you see the Windows 7 installation screen you can shell to a command console via Shift+F10. Run DISKPART and do a long format on the drive. That should be good enough.

 

There is something strange going on. Every now and then not so frequent but happens multiple times), the machine produces an alert sound (the same you hear once you plug in a USB flash drive).

Hopefully, someone can tell me what this is...

 

Thanks for the advice. I may end up getting this cable for convenience and will probably worth it for the future.


Amazon.com: Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25 (White): Electronics

I wish they were just selling the cable because I don't need the software for cloning

 

I would say I may be able to get $65.00--not sure if it is worth selling it?!

 

I use Welcome to BYTECC They are getting pretty scarce. I bought mine on amazon but it is no longer in stock.

looks like Bytecc USATA-136 USB/eSATA to SATA 7+15pin Cable, 36" - Bytecc Cables - BYTECC - TopMicroUSA has them in stock

 

Have anyone tried using the latest TPFanControl (tpfc_v062) in W520?

___________
Lenovo Thinkpad W520 | i7-2720QM | NVIDIA Quadro 1000M | 16GB DDR3 | 128GB MyDigitalSSD mSATA SSD | 500GB 7200 | HD+ | 9-Cell

 

I just ordered the W520 from Lenovo UK. I'm buying more RAM and looking at this eBay site from US 16GB 2X 8GB DDR3 PC3-10600 SODIMM PC10600 1333MHz LAPTOP MEMORY RAM 16 GB (8GBx2 | eBay

Is this the right RAM for the W520? And how do you rate this brand?

 

The delay was because of the 500GB 7200RPM. However, I can see that the 320 GB 7200RPM will ship fast though not as fast as the 500GB 5400 RPM.

 

I have been working on my new machine since 2 days and I really like it. However, I will have some questions being new to Lenovo. First, to be honest, the display is less crisp than what I expected (I have the FHD). I usually accept the small text to gain the crispness but I do not get that here and also the colors are so bright (reminds me of regular display in HPs). Hopefully, there is some calibration that can be done to adjust that.

Second, I have rubbery smell (if I can describe that right) coming out of the machine especially when the fan kicks in. It probably comes from the fan vent. Is that because it is still new or what?

 

Does this cable provide a faster speed than the USB?

 

I get this noise when my DVD drive goes offline into power-saving mode.

 

Yeah, I just figured this out and changed Power Settings to leave it always Powered ON. Noise is gone.

 

I have one too, very handy but I think the OP wants to hook they drive up to a desktop. These cables only work with combo USB/ESATA ports found on the w520 and some other notebooks. They would be better off getting an external USB hard drive enclosure.

 

Yes, it's attached to the hard drive bus via the E-SATA port, but it will only work on 2.5" drives. The power comes from the integrated USB port at 5 volts, the larger desktop sized hard drives require 12 volts. Great for techs who work on laptops and such, but most people would get more use out of some form of external hhd enclosure.

 

I already have an external USB hard drive that I will use to transfer my data from my desktop to W520. I was thinking to get this cable to manage my replaced HDD 2.5" but will have to think about it as it may not worth it.

 

I just wanted to point out that there are enclosures that you can get to use with the replaced hdd that'll plug into any system. You generally want something that'll protect the drive from getting banged up as well as giving you the ability to connect it to other systems.

2.5in Enclosures at Memory Express

 

Thank you very much. This one is nice and cheap.

 

I just ordered a W520. Crucial has memory at 1.5v or 1.35v. Which is correct? Which is better? Do they both work?

I can't find specs on this anywhere.

Thanks,
David

 

Yes, new W520s have a toxic smell.

I let it "burn in" in the cellar for 12 hours, using the diagnostic stress test, to get rid of the toxic smell (and to make sure everything works OK).

After that it is fine.

 

Glad to know it is not only mine. Would you please elaborate on what I should do exactly? Do you mean that I should just let it run as usual and the smell will go by time or what?

 

No better, no worse. Both work.

Generally, lower voltage is considered "better" as it consumes less power and may generate less heat. However, the system must be designed support DDR3L to enable the memory module to run at 1.35V. If the system does not support DDR3L, the module will run at 1.5V.

 

Is the W520 designed to support DDR3L? That's the spec I cannot find anywhere. Thanks for the info.

 

The W520 supports DDR3 @ 1.5V. From the tabook:

 

Thanks, Kaso.

 

I would recommend that you enable automatic powering off of the optical drive on battery power. You can get a bit better battery life with no inconvenience to yourself.

 

Hi, i was just wondering if someone could answer a video card question for me. Whenever I am looking at my thinkvantage toolbox or running system scans, my intel graphics card always shows up and I never see my Nvidia one. The Nvidia card shows up on the device manager but never when I do system scans. Is this normal?

 

You probably have Optimus running in the back ground. Try running the dedicated or the integrated GPU only, via the BIOS.