W520 - Any Recommendations for a New User?

Hello everyone,

First of all, my apologies if this is a repeat thread, or if it retreads old ground. I have browsed the owners' thread for the W520 as well as the Lenovo / IBM forum in general, but had some trouble synthesizing the mountains of information.

I recently purchased (and received, in 1-2 weeks) my W520 (basic specs are 2720QM, 4 GB of RAM, the 500GB HDD, a Quadro 2000M with 2GB of discrete memory, 1080p screen). It's my first Lenovo laptop, and my first new machine in close to 5 years (upgrading from a trusty but behind-the-times HP dv5000). So far, after a few hours of use, I'm very happy. It seems like a great machine.

However, as a new Lenovo user (and after reading the owners' thread), I'm rather overwhelmed by the huge number of possible configurations and tweaks.

Therefore, are there any highly recommended configurations/adjustments/tweaks that W520 owners swear by? I'm thinking of anything from Power Management tweaks to uninstalling (or installing) certain programs or BIOS upgrades... Similarly, are there any best practices that I should follow to get the most out of my new purchase?

Many thanks,
Chac Mool

 

I'd go through the preload and uninstall the enterprise stuff you don't need.

A good defragger is a must for that HDD. I recommend UltimateDefrag (paid) or MyDefrag (free).

In general, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

A few things for battery life. Grab the Optimus Tester Tools (you'll find it on Google). Use it to monitor processes that are triggering the discrete graphics card when they shouldn't/don't need to. Chrome tends to do it. Same with IE9.

Standard system optimizations apply. Avoid messing with Lenovo services (disabling or uninstalling them outright is fine); it interferes with RapidBoot sometimes.

 

When you get it, take out of the box and soak it in for a bit before you get all anal about everything. It never is better than when you first get it. Congrats, it's a great machine.

 

Go buy a well thought of SSD and replace your hard drive. Night and day diff. W520 is enough of a monster that you don't want your current HD to be a bottleneck.

 

Buy another 4 Gig of ram, windows 7 loves it's ram. SSD is a great way to go if you can afford a good drive, some people are squeamish about reinstalling the OS but if you make the recovery disks it's a mickey mouse procedure.

I also highly recommend setting up a strong supervisor password in the bios and require that or the fingerprint scan to boot. It'll slow down your boot time but if anyone ever walks off with your new laptop, they'll need to send it back to Lenovo to have the mother board replaced.

 

More RAM, sure. All the other stuff....look, if this is your primary machine and you need it for school/work......I just don't understand the fascination with tweaking your machine. Leave it stock, don't upgrade the bios unless it is a documented fix for a problem you are having NOW. Grab a solid antivirus, I use Eset NOD32.
After I get around to building a new desktop is when I'll go mSATA, in the meantime I don't want to be down for even a single day...

 

Regarding power management:

I found that whenever I was plugged in, I wanted max power, and whenever I was unplugged, I wanted to get the most out of my battery.

So, I tweaked the "Power Source Optimized" profile to give me max performance when plugged in, and max battery life while unplugged. It saves me switching the power profile all the time. Of course, tweak your screen dim times, and sleep timers etc to whatever you prefer.

 

Any chance you have the 64 bit ver of the Optimus Test Tool? Can't seem to find it anywhere

 

Nice laptop you picked up.
If I were you, I would upgrade the HDD to a SSD or Hybrid drive (if you need the extra capacity) and put your old one into the ultrabay.
Depending on your usage, 8gb might be worth it.

 

I agree 100%. An SSD does not make much difference if you play mainly games, but for productivity apps it makes the system run twice as fast!