Lenovo W520 Owner's Thread

when i plug in/take out the AC cable there seems to be a transition made, like a shift to another 'profile'

the screen flashes and a beeping sound is made

how do I stop/disable this entire transition?

i dont want the computer to make any changes from the way it is when the power cable is connected (i understand the effects of battery life, etc.)

 

Turn off the beeping noises in the BIOS. Change your power profile settings either in the Power Options control panel applet or in Thinkvantage Power Manager.

 

Will ultrabay caddy for HDD on my T500 fit the W520?

 

I just got the W520, but have noticed some problems with battery life. I charged it fully before first use, and afterwards I try to calibrate the battery by using it until on battery until it hibernates then charging it fully again. However, after 2 such cycles, at full charge it only displays about 4 hours of battery life (even less if I change to high performance), and it seems that battery life meter can fluctuate a lot depending on my brightness settings, like by up 1 more hour if I turn down brightness a lot. Also, I had an external hard drive plugged in, and after taking it out it seemed to increase the battery life meter by around 50 minutes. Anyone know what I could be doing wrong? I know the 9 cell battery that comes with the W520 should last at least 7 hours if not more, but I'm getting nowhere near that.

 

No. You need the newly design version.

 

Ummmm....

So, let's say you have a bucket of water. You take a small cup, and repeatedly dip it into the bucket until you have removed all the water.

Then, refill the bucket. Now, take your foot and kick the bucket over.

Any questions?

 

Haven't used the Lenovo one but I have used a MS one.

Yes, it has had some bugs in the past but it IS much better now. IMO it's great for users that don't know much about computers and don't ever update.

 

Battery life does fluctuate depending on what you do, and what you have plugged in. Plugging in a receiver for a wireless mouse will drop my battery life by about 1 hour. Plugging in a USB flash drive does roughly the same. In fact, plugging in a cable for a printer does that. I can get 7 hours on a full charge on 9 brightness watching 720p videos using MPC-HC and Sandy Bridge's decoder. Alternatively, I can get 9 ~ 10 hours if I surf the web on wifi with no flash. In both cases I use "balanced" for my CPU performance setting in Power Manager. I would recommend you to unplug all peripherals and adjusting your power settings accordingly for 7+ hours of battery life. Also, it would help if you could tell us what you are doing on battery.

 

I have freshly installed Windows and drivers. For some reason, the charger is connected and the battery indicator says plugged in not charging. Any clue?

The battery indicator is at 97%

 

The answer is bolded.

 

Is that something specific to Lenovo because this is not usually the case with other laptop brands I have worked on?

 

Is this the Ultrabay for W520? Lenovo - Find accessories for your laptop and desktop - Storage -

 

You'll need this one instead for the W520 due to the differences in height of the original Ultrabay hard drive adaptor. Alternatively you can seek out a third party 12.7mm caddies on eBay which effectively does the same job.

 

My W520 has a 15.6 FHD screen, Quadro 2000M, i7-2760QM, and 160 SSD, and it seems that even on balanced power plan, and screen brightness at 9-10, the lenovo battery manager says that my power usage is just over 20 watts, and goes to 25-28 when running on higher brightness and using more graphically intense applications. Occasionally, the power usage will drop to 14-16 watts, but this isn't too often. Also, it appears that my CPU usage is stuck at around 33% even though the task manager shows it at close to 0%, and it also shows my GPU usage at 100% even if I'm just on chrome. Does this have something to do with the FHD screen and is this level of power usage typical for W520's? Or is it just my computer?

 

You can change this behavior in Power Manager but it is being done to prolong your battery's life.

 

Very much appreciated.

More questions,

It seems it is taking an awful long time in the
"Setup is preparing your computer for first use"
screen. The progress bar keeps moving but its been 45min. any thoughts? Start this process over?

 

If you look in the Power Manager Advanced mode settings under battery, you will be enlightened.

 

i made all those changes but there is still something clearly going on when you plug in or take out the ac adapter

i essentially don't want the computer to know the difference..

 

Something got stuck (say, a program checking on a condition and never exiting) and that last step did not finish normally.

Make sure you have no external devices connected to the laptop. Have the SWTOOLS folder copied to a UBS flash drive.

Restart. Give that "preparation" step a chance to finish. If the delay is longer than 15 minutes, press Shift+F10 to get a command prompt. Type devmgmt.msc to bring up the Device Manager window. You can now verify if certain drivers were not "restored" properly. If so, you can try to "update" them (right-click menu), browsing to the SWTOOLS folder on the flash drive and telling Windows to scan the subdirectories.

Type taskmgr.exe to get the Task Manager window. Click Processes tab. For any msiexec.exe and cmd.exe processes on the list, select and click End Process. (They are likely the stuck programs that cause the "preparation" step to wait and wait.)

You will soon get the window for entering user name and computer name.

Hope it will work for you.

 

If you are doing a BIOS update via the .EXE method and it gets stuck, I would not attempt it again.

I would advise downloading the .ISO and burning the bootable CD.

 

It's because Lenovo does things a little bit smarter than the rest of the companies. Keeping a Li-ion battery at 100% is actually harmful to the battery, so Lenovo implemented the power manage system so that it won't recharge the battery until it has dropped at least 4% below its max charge threshold. The amount of battery life you get out of 4% is 20mins at best under normal conditions, so it's no big deal compared to the other 8 or so hours.

 

Kaso,
Awesome detialed info.

Unfortunatly for me I did not save SWTOOLS folder.

I started the process over.
In BIOS boot I set,
1. DVDROM
2. HHD2 SATA SSD

Inserted the recovery boot CD, English, recover from CD/DVD drive, recover lose all previous data, prompt-loaded the next 3 recovery DVD's, yes restart....
The computer restarted, thinkpad logo, than it goes black and the green HDD-logo below the screen flashes very fast but nothing changes.

Thanks again for your time.

..the Product Recovery process never asked me where it should save this recovery data too..?

I have done this process in my T61p which I'm currently using and never had this issue before.

 

Since I have freshly installed Windows 7 and tried carefully to install all drivers, the only remaining unrecognized device that I am not sure what it is and cannot resolve it has the following ID Value ACPI/LEN0068. Any clue what would this be and where I can find its driver?

Edit: I finally figured it out. I had to install the Lenovo Power Manager Driver.

 

I was under the impression that you had finished with Recovery (because the "preparing for first use" step was actually Windows at work). You should reboot from the SSD drive, not the DVD drive.

Please try that.

 

Fantastic wealth of knowledge you hold.

It will not boot from the SSD, the screen stays black.
I did get it to boot from the HHD and I'm now up to the "Windows7Pro Set UP Window" which ask for Country, time, keyboard info.

The recovery process never asked where I wanted the info to load too.

Before the steps listed above I had,
I set bios to 1.DVDRAM 2. SSD, F10, enter. Recovery steps/dvd's, restart..

Never asked me where to store the recovery data. .

This Forum is a priceless resource.

 

Unless it has been a long day and you need a break, please do the following.

Take out the HDD from the primary bay and leave the mSATA SSD in its slot.

Repeat the Recovery process (one more time ): boot from DVD with Recovery CD and DVDs inserted in the right sequence, etc...

 

Posting from my lighting fast W520 Thanks you Kaso!

Your instructions worked flawlessly.

-I can now, go back into BIOS and set my SSD as first on the list replacing the DVDROM coorect?

-Any tips before I pop in the HHD again? Just insert it and erase all info?

Should I change any other setting or should that cover everything.

Thank you again for solving this problem for me.

 

You're welcome. I feel "relieved," too.

Correct.

You have an SSD boot drive and a Recovery disc set that all work fine. So, the HDD is going to be your storage drive. Use your "super fast" W520 for a few days, perform Windows updates and what not... Then, you can pop the HDD back in, bring up Disk Management, delete all the partitions and merge them into one partition, and do a Format on it. (It will likely be assigned D: by Windows.)

That's basically it.

 

I am relieved.

 

@LOMartin, if @Kaso helped you then add reputation to him.

Just a way of saying "Thank You"

 

Way ahead of you. Added to rep and a blurb in the comment section.

 

writing this on my ipad so i apoligize for grammar- i know this isnt a technical supprt forum, but im getting BSOD from connecting to the internet. both wifi and ethernet! im guessing this is something i did, but im not sure what. last thing i thhink i did was update adobe reader. im trying a windows update now to see if that works. if anyone has an idea of what it could be it would be most appreciated!

by the way the 16gb ram upgrade is wonderful. i did a noise test with my zoom h4n and it sounded noisier without the ram upgrade by a little- so i think that was all in my head! editing video on this machine is amazingly smooth so far. sony vegas live preview on "best" quality runs smoooooth. i'm very happy with it- going to try rendering tonight while i sleep, i'm sure it will not overheat like my older laptop does

edit- windows updates did not fix the problem! it feels like all i do lately is fix things... technology....

edit 2- tried ccleaner, also didnt work. tried starting up in safe mode w/ network and had same issue!

edit 3- Usually I'm happy when Avast scans show that I have no viruses... Normally I would just restore Windows but I really don't have the time to install everything again since I'm going out of town tomorrow.

edit 4- It's fixed! I'm not exactly sure what it was- uninstalling Virtualbox? Probably not. It was probably reinstalling the wireless drivers. Which probably should have been the first thing I should have done.... Yay

 

Guys i have a small problem with my google chrome browser. All of the sudden today it seems very blurry or fuzzy. As if its on lower resolution. Firefox is normal, looks crisp and HD. What could be the problem?

 

I also notice the same happened to my stock charting software. It also went blurry and look as if its on lower resolution. Driving me nuts, how can i fix this?

 

I figured how to fix it, went to properties and checked "disable high dpi scaling", weird how that just happened.

 

advice needed:

I have the ultimate-n 6300 wifi card in my w520.

about every 20 minutes, i get a yellow triangle over the wifi bars and it says no access, but its still connected a full bars.

Disconnecting and reconnecting resolves the issue until it resurfaces 20-30 minutes later

how do I fix this? the drivers are up to date, and I made sure that there is no battery saving feature that is set to disable to network adapter.

thanks for your help!

 

I've the same issue on my T500 when I connect my laptop to my work office WiFi, still get internet access. When I'm home, it doesn't happen

 

does your work happen to use an apple router?

at home I have an apple router, and I have problems with it

while i'm on campus I have no issues, almost 100% sure they dont use apple wifi

 

I have an Apple airport express.
Sometimes when I load a new webpage, a box comes up and says windows encountered a problem and must close. It asks if I want to fix the problem, so I click yes and it finds a problem with internet access, just can't remember exactly what it says. Then I just close the pop-up box and and at the bottom of the screen, a new box comes up and says IE encountered a problem and had to shut down and reload the webpage. It only takes a second for the IE to restart and reload the webpage. I'm not sure if it's certain webpages that are the problem, or something else.

 

Sounds like you are running an old crappy version of the Adobe Flash add-in.

Go to the Manage Add-Ins area for IE and disable the Adobe Shockwave Flash object. Then go to adobe.com and install the latest version. After it installs, re-enable the add-in.

That usually fixes things.

 

No, it was probably Oracles code.

 

Thors, I've followed your steps, we'll see if the problems is fixed. Thanks

 

if anyone is interested, I turned off ipv6 support and i havent had a single yellow triangle, no access issue since (going on 24 hours now)

don't understand why turning that off would solve the problem, my gut tells me its apple's crappy time capsule thats the issue

i've been thinking about picking up one of these:

asus wifi router

 

I have 3 of those Asus RT-N66U routers running Tomato firmware. They're great.

 

thats good to hear that its a good router...i really want to get one

...but how did you get one already? newegg keeps pushing back the release date on it

..where did you order from? and what about that firmware makes it better than stock

 

We're going off-topic but...

I've had 2 of them since January and I got another one in early February from a local electronics store. The reason for the delay was the ASUS shipped the router with a web interface bug which rendered the router useless for English-language users. It didn't matter to me since I was putting Tomato on it. They stopped shipments and fixed the problem. A few places are selling them now and people are receiving their orders. Custom firmwares bring lots of features and stability to a router. Go to these threads...

ASUS RT-N66U Dark Knight Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router Reviewed - SmallNetBuilder Forums
Asus RT-N66u with TomatoUSB firmware - SmallNetBuilder Forums

 

+rep

thanks for the info, I just pre-ordered it from newegg
would this router take full advantage of the 3x3 wifi card that you can get as an option when you order the w520?

this dumb time capsule is the last apple product left in my house, can't wait till i can throw it in the trash

 

Thanks... It's a 450mbps x 450mpbs router so it does work at those speeds with my Ultimate-N equipped W520. Be sure to read both threads and the linked review so you know what you're buying.

 

For some reason, when I remove my W520 from the docking station, and continue to work on it, Firefox acts weird and is very slow and has lags when scrolling or moving among different tabs and even responding to key strokes. It was just working fine on my large monitor but once I remove it from the docking station, it does that until I restart the machine.

 

Hello

I recently brought a W520, I'm new to Lenovo's and not so familiar with Windows 7 so this maybe normal but it doesn't happen on XP on my PC

What i have noticed since being able to monitor my network data transfer/speed is that the network connection allows seems to be active in data transfer.

every couple of second any where from 1B to 900B is being downloaded and uploaded (sometimes more but its usually less that 500B) is this normal for Win7?

On my XP PC the same thing happens but it sits at 0B longer.

Thanks in Advance