W510 - Hardware fault - Speakers shorting out

After about 1 week of use, my new W510, 820, multitouch, is suffering from significant hardware problems.


First it began locking up. Then crashing.

It was sitting in a docking station, with the screen closed, with good ventilation and in a cold room. My W500 practically lived in the same spot.

Last night I was watching a DVD, and it was working fine. The movie began stuttering. I restarted. The system locked up during boot. I reset, got into windows, and then had a hard-lock. Gave up and went to bed.

This morning, every time a sound starts to play, the left speaker makes a loud popping sound (akin to some kind of short) and then all sound stops. I can listen to the first 3 seconds of an .mp3, during which there is repeated popping, and then all sound stops.

It also makes a popping sound when I push the power button. I even reset the BIOS to factory defaults, and reloaded the system from the factory recovery CDs.

I did not change anything between when the system worked fine and when this problem started.

I am calling tech support later, but as there hasn't been a response from Lenovo regarding this apparent widespread problem, I am hoping to just return my new W510 and stick with my W500 until it seems that Lenovo has addressed this problem.

For $2.5k, I expected a bit more in-house testing. Far too many users are reporting this issue for this to have been some kind of isolated issue.

Not sure if it is due to improper wiring, faulty chips, always-on charging USB, but it is far too big an issue.
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