Y500 Owners and Questions Thread

Running at full potential? Sounds like wasted potential if you're gonna pay $600 for an i7-3840QM and never utilize that power. It reminds of those people who buy an i7-3960X just to boost their e-peen but never actually use the damn thing fully. What exactly do you do that needs that extra CPU power if you don't mind me asking? It surely can't be gaming. You'd be much better off spending that same money on another system with a 7970M/GTX 680M/GTX 670MX SLI because that would actually improve your gaming.

On the other hand, if you do like heavy video editing or something and need a faster processor, the 3840QM is a terrible choice considering the price. For $600 you could get a last-gen 2960XM with more cache and unlocked multipliers and overclock the stuffing out of it, although I doubt you'll squeeze too much out considering the thermals of the Y400 aren't great. Even better, a 2920XM is half the price and just as overclockable and you could spend the difference on 2x16GB SO-DIMM's for your video editing or rendering or whatever and upgrade to 1080p while you're at it too.

With your current Y400 configuration I don't think there's much need to OC the GPU's since your screen resolution is so low. Just bump up the settings to maximum in most games and enjoy.

If Crysis 3 is leaving your system wanting though go ahead and follow the Kepler OC guide on here. I haven't had a chance to OC my system yet and I don't know what other clocks Y400/500 owners are generally getting but the 650M in these machines seem like decent overclockers from what I've seen. In the end, every system is different so you're just gonna have to test it yourself.

Also, keep in mind that you're not gonna be getting temperatures as low as Y500 owners since your case is smaller and that always affects cooling and airflow to some extent in a lapotp. How much it changes, I don't know. Could be a little, could be a lot. Probably best to ask what other Y400 SLI owners are experiencing. Reason I bring this up is that you might find temperatures to be a limiting factor especially if you decide to get an XM CPU and overclock it along with overclocked or possibly overvolted GPU's. Like I said one fan serving two heatsinks for the CPU and GPU isn't a great cooling solution.

 

Question to win 7 Users.
is your os stable?.(by stable i mean if you click something and are expecting a certain result, you get that result and that result only)
does it run more smoothly than win 8. (DO not reply in rant about win 8)
Are there any issues corcerns.

i am asking this because the stability of my windows 8 is quite concerning, Things are happening that i have never seen before in my entire life. at one point my microphone started to translate my english language voice to transformer language. i guess the os has become unreliable. there are days that this runs amazingly but those days are followed by other days of pain and depression as you see your i7 cpu dying for no apparent reason.

 

Yes i might just wait for my system first see how it goes and if i need more power then i figure it out later. Thanks for your advice. Also i dont do any editiing at all just the need for speed But i do have an external monitor 1920x1080 which i will also do some gaming on.

 

Got a new problem -___- not liking lenovo ONE BIT!!!!!

Well, i installed fifa on my y500 (power plugged in, not running on battery) and while i was in the team selection screen, my game just crashed (white screen with the sound stuck in loop). I waited 2-3 mins bt nothing happened so i just powered it off and then turned it on again.

Well, now it doesnt boot. It shows the lenovo screen, then says preparing automatic repair then it says windows cant boot.

Now what do i do? I have the win8 recovery usb bt dont know what option should i use. Any help?

Btw the one key recovery is the LAST RESORT as i dont want to reinstall all the drivers again

 

Sounds like a good problem for "Last Known Good Configuration." Unfortunately, Windows 8 turns this off by default. The first thing I would try if this happened to me would be booting to safe mode and uninstalling the display driver completely. Then reboot. I think your driver got corrupted because you shut the pc down during a display event, potentially corrupting the driver file on the hard drive. I think this is an Nvidia problem, not a Lenovo problem. Or a combination of Nvidia and Windows 8 since I've seen a lot of people struggling with Nvidia driver compatibility. If you can boot safely back into Windows after safe mode and uninstalling the bad driver, try version 310.90. It's supposed to be stable.

 

Does anyone know of alternatives to the Lenovo ultrabay for the Y500? $189 is ridiculous...

Also - has anyone successfully done RAID0/1 between an SSD in the normal bay and an mSata SSD? Looking to run three drives for video editing.

Thanks!

 

You mean the Ultrabay hard drive option? I agree that it is way overpriced. Too bad you need the proprietary mount because you can't just fit any hard drive caddy in there.

HM76 does not support RAID, so you would need to find another laptop using the HM77 chipset if you want that.

 

Yep exactly. Oh well about the RAID, but what a bummer! This laptop was too good @$799 to resist when I already have an 8gb stick of ram and an SSD waiting to go in it. I spose' I'll go the mSata route that I've read all around here. Someone should 3D print some bays up... .

 

Is there an easy way to clone your hdd to 256gb msata ssd?

 

Thanks for your reply. The 310.91 driver, does it have the brightness bug? I mean can i change the brightness after installing this version?

 

There is no brightness bug in 310.90, my brightness works fine.

 

Hey guys, I have a cruicial msata 256gb ssd on the way. What is the easiest way to clone my hdd onto it? I'm not that experienced so please keep it simple. From what I can tell its not as easy as switching from hdd to sata ssd. The cloning process there was pretty simple. But I returned my sata ssd and now I'm back to the hdd. So I just need to know an easy way to get my y500 running the OS off the msata ssd like I did with my sata ssd? From my google searches i don't know if there is? Thank you

Ok, so I found a tutorial:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/triple-your-speed-how-to-install-an-msata-ssd-boot-drive-in-your-laptop

I installed the msata ssd but I am not seeing it being read? I don't see it in my computer, and I dont see it in disk management....any ideas? do I have to enable it somewhere?

 

Just to let some of you know, if you want to have a second storage drive (ie; two hard drives) all you need is the ultrabay optic drive and a 9.5mm caddy. Then replace the optic drive with the caddy and put in whatever storage drive you want into the caddy. No need to get the actual OEM ultrabay caddy. IMO, it's way too expensive for what it is. For non-SLI owner, this is good because ours come with an optiic drive, but for the SLI owner, they will have to drop some more cash for an ultrabay optic drive.

I currently have two hard drives in my Y500; the original 1TB 5400RPM drive and a spare 500GB 7200RPM drive from my M17x.

 

Great info! I didn't know that and it will help me out a lot in the future. Guess you learn something new every day.

 

Hello everyone,
i was today faced with the infamous touchpad issue of the elan touchpad. i rebooted my laptop to ubuntu and the issue ceased to exist. can anyone else confirm this?
i have posted the instruction as to how to install ubuntu on y500
P.S. this is the issue where your mouse randomly moves around like crazy and clicking and openieng random things (and would command an army in starcraft by itself : )

 

Guys need help :/

I am not able to install nvidia driver. If i install Any version of the driver whether beta or recommended, my pc just gets stuck on lenovo bootloader loop. I have even tried a full clean installed (followed a guide from this forum involving driver sweeper etc) nd windows doesn't load. Is it a hardware problem or what?

Btw i get a bsod everytime I play a game. Sometimes it's something watchdog_Violation nd sometimes tdr_nvrm something like that

I can easily say this will be my last lenovo..... Disappointed...

 

It could be that some of the advanced touch features do not work in Ubuntu whereas they do in Windows and that could be where the problem lies. Does touch to click work in Ubuntu? Or maybe it is 2 finger touching that is messing with it in Windows?

 

hmm did you try the one key recovery thingy
it should reset you pc to default pc settings. even though the laptop may remain buggy it should fix the bootloader issue.

 

i am not sure but if this is the case then does this affect windows 7 users. if we install pre multitouch drivers, does the problem automatically fix itself? ... is the problem even a hardware issue? ... soo many questions

yes touch to click does work in ubuntu but i have no multi touch gestures. i do however; have side scrolling, a feature that was missing from windows 8. there are some bugs in ubuntu of course. the biggest one is that sometimes the left click does not work on the desktop environment. it work on other softwares though

 

Even that doesn't work now. When I use the okr to restore, it says restore complete but then I get an error saying that windows can not boot giving an error 0x0000001.

I have tried to restore using okr many times. What do I do?

 

Hey Folks,

I'm looking at buying the Y500 in SLI.. I will be using this for gaming, so I'm coming here to see what yu owners recommend.. Is this laptop worthy or should I look at the Toshiba Qosmio, Dell XPS or Samsung Series 7 Gamer?

Thanks!

 

for a gamer the speakers performance price are amazing. the only let you will have is some driver issues and the glossy screen.

 

I think it may be obvious what most of the owners in the owners thread here may suggest!

Great machine at a great price, though you can spend more for bigger screen, marginally better graphics performance, better build quality. Really, it's up to you. Most other systems will be $1500-$1900+, this one can be had all in for roughly $1100, depending on where you live and where you're buying it from.

 

do you have a dvd drive
if you do burn a livecd of ubuntu remix
put it inside your laptop
close the laptop fully
press the novo button
select bios setup
turn secure boot off
go to the last tab
change win8optimized os to other os
also somewhere in the bios change uefi boot to legacy
move the optical disk above the hdd
boot into ubuntu live cd
select try ubuntu
click on unity (icon on top left of the screen)
select boot repair


see what happens

if you do not have a cd use a usb stick and make a live usb and change boot priority of usb over hdd
and go from there

 

Well i was able to run Windows but still I can't install nvidia driver. Do i first have to install 306.00 then update or clean install to 310.90 driver?

Edit: whenever I try to install a driver, the laptop just reboots

 

hmm that is odd
ok try updating chipset drivers then attempt to install the latest 314 whql drivers

if it still reboots go to lenovo china suppot page and download the 306.30 drivers listed under windows 7 then see what happenes

 

I'll update the chip set driver and then try again. Here is what happens (before updating chipset drivers.

1.installing driver 310.90 or 314.21 or 314.22. When I start the setup, it goes to installing graphics driver nd tthen laptop reboots in the middle of installation

2. Installing 306.00 from lenovo is successfully installed but the games crash on it after 5min of playing.

3. Updating 306.00 to 310.90 (no clean install) is successful but the games still crash and pc restarts. Then I have to restore to a previous restore point

Edit: you said from win7 driver section? I am running win8 x64

 

Two questions guys,

1.) I know SLI has this issue called micro stuttering, but what if I go for a single ddr5 gt 650 with an optical drive, will I still get micro stuttering since is is SLI ready but not running on dual gt 650m?

2.) Second one, can you test something for me about keyboard ghosting and if it exist on the y500. I'm mainly interested in the following 3 key combinations.

1.) W+E+Spacebar
2.) Q+W+Spacebar
3.) Q+W+D

The link to test the keyboard for ghosting issue is below, basically when all 3 are pressed, all 3 keys should light up and if it doesn't, it has kb ghosting issue.

Microsoft Applied Sciences Group


Thanks guys

 

Yes on the lenovo china website. you can get the 306.30 drivers and then try updating those drivers

 

Yo,

I have the Y500 SLI edition, and I replaced the 16GB caching SSD with a Cruzer m4 256GB SSD, did a clean windows install on that.

I'm now trying to figure out the partitions on the 1TB HDD. Which ones do I still need? Here's the thing:

Without really realizing the impact it'd have, when changing the partitions on the 1TB hdd, I changed it to a dynamic disk. I want to change it back, but without losing any important data. Trying to use EaseUS, but it says the EFI/MSR partition will be lost if I use that option.

What do I do now? =o Do I still need the EFI partition considering I have a clean windows install?

 

I'm considering buying a Y500. If I do a clean reinstall of Windows 7, which I will have to do for work, will the SSD drive work as it's supposed to? Also, I assume SLI will work after my Windows 7 install? Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

 

I have another question on buying a new Y500. If I want both the extra graphics card and the Blu-ray drive, is the best option to buy the system directly from the Lenovo site? I would rather buy from Amazon, but I don't seem to be able to get the Blu-ray drive there. I also can't find anywhere else to buy the Blu-ray drive on its own.

 

just so this won't be missed

 

Bueller? ?

 

Bueller? ?

 

Dude no need to spam post here. Your questions will be get answered in due time.

You can fit any optical drive in the Y500 Ultrabay as long as you have the Ultrabay mount, which is what the DVD/Blu-ray drive is screwed onto when you buy it from Lenovo.com. You can even fit an additional 2..5'' HDD/SDD if you get a generic 9.5 mm drive caddy and screw that onto the Ultrabay mount. But since the Ultrabay accessories are so expensive on Lenovo.com at the moment your best bet is to probably buy the Y500 SLI from Amazon and get an external USB Blu-ray drive.

 

Sorry for rushing. New to the forum and used to being in places where a little encouragement is not frowned on.

Thanks for the answer. An external drive is not what I want, and I'm not too worried about the cost. However, i would prefer to buy the system from Amazon, rather Lenovo (mostly for the speed of delivery).

Is there an internal Blu-ray anyone has paired with the generic caddy and gotten working? Also can someone please post a link to the generic caddy?

Thanks again.

 

This is not the most active thread on here and waiting more than 6 hours for an answer to your specific question is not out of the ordinary.

If you are buying from Amazon you need to order an Ultrabay DVD drive from here so that you have the mount that you need. They don't sell an Ultrabay Blu-ray drive yet, only the DVD drive, and it's $70, but you can get $10 off if you sign up for Lenovo Barnes and Noble Gold here.



Once you get that unscrew the DVD drive from the mount and install whatever Blu-ray drive you want. If I have time later I'll take a picture of my DVD drive to show you where the screws are but it's not hard to figure out.

There is no such thing as a generic caddy because Lenovo uses a proprietary mount for installing optical drives in the Ultrabay. They don't sell it separately so that only way to get it is to buy a DVD drive per my previous instructions.

 

Awesome. Thanks for the info! Two more questions, then I'll leave you alone:

1) can I get any internal laptop blu-ray drive to put in the DVD mount, or do I need something specific? Would this be fine?

2) per my other post, I just want to confirm that all the hardware will work as intended, even if I completely blank the installed software and install Windows 7 (which I will have to do for work). I'm especially nervous about the SLI and the SSD drive working as intended if I start from scratch.

Thanks again.

 

1. They should all work, but do make sure that the mounting holes on whichever Blu-ray drive you use matches those on the Ultrabay mount.
2. All the hardware should work, but you need to go to Lenovo's website to download Windows 7 drivers.

 

Orders placed. System and blu-ray drive from Amazon. Ultrabay DVD burner from Lenovo.

I'm sure I'll be writing again soon...

 

The anticipation is killing me...

 

Sorry if I've been posting too much today, and thanks again for the help.

 

@octiceps
Noticed you have the 1TB 5400 HD. Do you feel it impacts performace in Win 8 or in games?

 

Nah it's cool don't even sweat it. Fire away, that's what this place is for.

 

Okay, so I'm planning on getting this version of the Lenovo Y500:
Amazon.com: Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 15.6-Inch Laptop (Metal - Dusk Black): Computers & Accessories
The one with the i5 core, 6 GB of ram, and no 16GB SSD.

I'm new to this whole SSD thing so I'll need some clarification before buying.
Is it possible to have both the HDD and a SSD in the laptop? If so does it belong in the Ultrabay? And if I want to install the OS, can I just transfer the pre-installed one over to the SSD or I do I have to go out and buy a brand new OS? And what SSD's would be compatible with the Y500?

And does the Y500's on the Lenovo website not include SLIs? Is that something exclusive to Newegg and Amazon?

Oh, and is the i5 in the laptop quad or duo core? If it's the latter, what is it equivalent to for desktop processors? Just need a comparison for game requirements and stuff.

 

I have he Y400 coming but I have been researching for a bit and even looked at that very system.

The Y500 has actually 3 connections for hard drives. There is the normal SATA connection that allows SSD and regular HDs. They need to be 2.5" laptop drives. Not sure on the thickness requirement. You can get a SSD to put here that would replace the current HD. The second is a mSATA connection. Some configurations have a 16GB mSATA drive used for caching. You can buy your own small mSATA drive for caching or you can buy a bigger mSATA drive (I think up to 500 GB, not sure, I know they go up to around 256GB) but they can be more expensive than the regular laptop SSD drive. This can be a hard drive (main or secondary) along with the included HD or whatever you put in that spot. The third is the ultrabay can accomodate a drive. You need to have a ultrabay that takes the HD. They sell one or I have read you can modify the DVD ultrabay too (might need to look around of info on that). You can have the ultrabay along with the internal HD and the mSATA. I assume you could run you OS from that.

So to run an OS from a new HD (SDD or new HD) I think you need to either install from a Windows 8 disc (I believe the key is encoded in the BIOS so all you need is the media). Or you can call Lenovo to see if they will send recovery discs (for a fee possibly) and install from those.

The i5 is dual core. I am not sure on performance. I went with the i7 but I have read differing opinions that basically say the i5 is just as good as the i7 right now, but the i7 is a bit more future proof. But I can't say for sure how long the i5 will last.

Hope that answered some questions, someone else can correct anything I might be off on here.

 

Yes it does impact both, but how much it impacts and whether I notice it or not depends on the situation. I have never owned an SSD so I can't give you any comparisons but I do plan on getting my first one, a Crucial m4 mSATA for this notebook, as soon as I have the funds.

Windows 8 has the fastest boot and shutdown time of any OS I have ever used so even with this slow-a** hard disk it does better in that regard than my Windows 7 desktop which has a 1TB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda. Overall performance in the OS is about the same or slightly slower on the laptop but since I'm comparing W7 and W8 it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. File read and write are a little bit slower but not very noticeable unless I'm actually checking the transfer rates.

Besides slightly longer loading times there is no difference in the performance of most games. This is to be expected as most games load completely into RAM before running. However, games that do a lot of streaming from disk during gameplay stutter more and the minimum frame rate is much lower. Source Engine and especially Unreal Engine 3 games are the worst for me. Both these engines do a lot of asset loading in real-time to reduce initial load times but if you're running a mechanical drive with high random access times then this will cause your game to stall occasionally. UE3 is notorious for pop-in and that is actually texture and geometry data being loaded on the fly.

 

Thanks for the reply. Never had an SSD but I hear it helps a lot. Been going back and forth between the SSD to replace the HD or an mSATA. While I could use the 1TB drive for storage with the mSATA, I am going to use the laptop exclusively for games so I am not sure what I would really need the 1TB drive for. Although your explanation of some games loading into RAM first makes me think..But I think I am just going to save and save, wait for a good deal on a 500 GB SSD to replace the HD with. They have gotten down to around 280 recently so I think over the next few months they may get down in the $250 range. I was also waiting until I get the laptop to see if I even can tell on the games I will be playing initially.

 

Only Newegg and Amazon currently sell SLI configurations. You can still get SLI if you order from Lenovo.com but then you have to buy the 170W charger and Ultrabay GPU separately.

The mobile i5 is a dual-core CPU with Hyper-Threading. Slower than a desktop i3 since it is basically an underclocked version of that. The mobile i7 is quad-core with Hyper-Threading and should perform around a desktop i5 (quad-core w/o HT) or slightly faster if Hyper-Threading is utilized.