Y500 Owners and Questions Thread

No you can turn on SLI in the Nvidia control panel.

 

I'm currently in the same situation, but I don't understand what you mean when you say you can install "whatever Blu-ray drive you want". There's quite a handful of different optical drive standards for laptops; which specs should I be looking at for my Y500's ultrabay?

I didn't do my homework before purchasing this optical drive. Now that I have this, I have a few questions:

1) Will this drive work with my Y500's ultrabay?
2) If the answer to #1 is yes, what else do I need to make this blu-ray drive work with my Y500? (I have a Y500 with dual gpus). I assume I need to purchase this, and swap out the DVD drive, correct? Is there still no option to just buy the mounting bracket?

 

Awesome. Thanks.

 

You need the mounting bracket from the Y500 Ultrabay DVD module and you would need to buy that. It's a proprietary mounting mechanism so you have no choice.

 

Well... I've finished my big work project and started playing with my Y500 yesterday. I was running Windows 8 from the original HDD, and installed a Crucial M4 256GB mSATA drive. I put my games on the mSATA and all was well. In fact, the game performance was blowing me away.

Then, I got a block of free time last night, and I tried to make a section of my mSATA into a express cache. Per the instructions in this thread, I uninstalled the express cache program. I was prompted to restart, but wanted to do one other thing before I did. I went into disc management and extended the NTFS drive on my mSATA, so I would have only 55GB of unallocated space, which I was hoping would become my express cache (I previously had 90 unallocated, which seemed like too much).

I restarted and was greeted with a "Preparing Automatic Repair" message, and that's all she wrote. One touch recovery is not working, the system will not move off of "Preparing Automatic Repair" (even if left for 10 minutes or more) and there are no circling dots indicating that anything is working. I think I've achieved brick status.

Like a moron, I did not create Windows 8 recovery discs before playing with the drive partition, figuring that, since the partitions were on my mSATA which does not contain the operating system, there was no real risk of losing bootability. Anyway, I'm now waiting for the recovery discs to come from Lenovo in the next 2-3 business days.

I assume there's no better option for creating Windows 8 recovery discs (the suggestion earlier in this thread isn't working for me), but let me know if anyone has a good idea for doing that. Otherwise, I guess I'll see you in a few days, when I've reinstalled Windows 8 on my mSATA.

 

You didn't format the OS drive on your regular hard drive did you? If not, try to just remove the mSATA drive and see if it works. It should.

 

Thanks, but I'd rather do a complete reinstallation than pull the mSATA. I want my games to live there, so they boot at blazing speeds (which they were doing, before I fouled things up). I have no data on my Y500 yet anyway (apart from downloads of games I can download again).

Any option out there for me to get a Windows 8 recovery stick or CD burned (legally) without waiting for Lenovo?

 

On a related point, if I do wait for the discs, will I be somehow forced to put all the bloatware back on there, or will I be able to leave it off? Also, once Windows 8 is installed, do I pop in the drivers disc the first time it boots to get the drivers back in place?

 

Do you have another windows 8 or windows 7 box? If so you can try what is in post #90 of this thread.

Also are you sure you can't get into one touch recovery from a cold boot? The 1TB drive was still your boot drive right?

 

Yes. It's weird. When I try one touch recovery, it prompts me to put a CD in the drive to reinstall Windows. Don't have a clue why, but I don't have a CD.

The only thing I did to the drive with Windows 8 was to uninstall expresscache. Really confusing to me how something could have happened to the recovery partition, which was on a separate drive from the one I was monkeying with. I saw the recovery partition sitting there (intact) in disc management right before this all happened.

 

FWIW, I am having absolutely no luck downloading a Win 8 install disc using the generic keys I can find online. The keys are recognized as valid, but then the MS service says "can't connect right now," and won't let me download the .iso.

 

Okay. Downloaded Win 8 and reinstalled it on mSATA (product key from BIOS worked automatically). Which drivers should I bother reinstalling? I've done video (from NVIDIA site), LAN, WLAN, and touchpad. Should I do others, such as chipset? Also, since I am now running Win 8 from my mSATA, do I need either Intel Rapid Store or Intel Rapid Start?

As a side note, in order to install Windows on my mSATA, I had to delete the "volume" on it and change it from a dynamic drive to a basic drive, all from a command prompt. Wasn't hard, once I Googled it, but never had to try that before.

 

Simple answer is, reinstall everything.

For a more detailed answer, the critical ones you want to install are:

• Audio --> Realtek Audio Drivers
• Bluetooth Drivers --> Intel Bluetooth D
• Camera and Card Reader --> JMicron Card Reader
• Camera and Card Reader --> Camera Driver
• Chipset --> Intel Chipset Driver
• Mouse and Keyboard --> Touchpad Driver (if you care about multi-gesture support on touchpad)
• Networking LAN Ethernet --> Atheros LAN Driver
• Networking Wireless LAN --> Intel WLAN Driver
• Power Management --> Lenovo Energy Management
• Software and Utility --> Intel RapidStart Technology
• Storage --> Intel Rapid Storage Techology
• USB Device --> (not needed. Included in Windows 8)
• Video --> (install from nVidia's website

This particular Lenovo Y400 / Y500 laptop is pretty good at leaving out bloatware. These are actually device drivers that I would consider to be part of a clean install.

It's completely different than something like Sony Vaio, whose driver pages usually include some bloatware garbage downloads like Sony Music Media Center.

 

Thanks. When I went to reinstall the audio driver, it said it was installing an Intel video driver. Need to keep puzzling through that one.

 

Just got my Y500, and I'm currently waiting for my W7Pro disc. I don't have patience for W8 without touchscreen, or W8 in general.

I'll replace the HDDs when I do the W7 install. I'm thinking a 64GB mSATA and 256GB SSD will do fine, and I can use the 1TB HDD as satellite storage - I will probably run without SLI most of the time and could use a nice fat slow thang to hold all my music.

What's the recommended approach for install drive versus express cache? make the whole mSATA express cache, since the SSD is big and fast enough for the install and programs?

 

I was in a similar situation as you. I wanted to install Windows 7, but it turned out to be a colossal pain in the rear. I didn't have an optical drive, so I had to isntall of of USB stick. And Windows 7 installer didn't play well with that.

Windows 8 is actually very useable. After you isntall it (which is a painless install process, BTW. I went with Windows 8 after spending 4 hours trying to install Windows 7 and gave up).... spend $5 to buy Start8 from Stardock. That will allow you to bypass the Windows Metro interface, and use your laptop as if it were a Windows 7 look/feel laptop.

 

StartIsBack is better and cheaper too. $3 for 2 PC's and $5 for for 5. I have tried all of the Start Menu replacements and it is by far the best. The developer claims that even though MS removed the Start Menu from W8 they had to leave a lot of its code intact for compatibility reasons and this leverages that. Unlike the others it actually looks, feels, and runs like a native Windows component. It doesn't even create any extra processes; it just loads an extra DLL into the Explorer process that Windows always runs anyway. If you're looking for the most authentic Start Menu this is it. Best $3 I've ever spent on any software and now Metro is all but gone for good from my system.

That was not intended to be a shill attack by the way. I absolutely detested Windows 8 until I discovered this little gem and now I have the best of both worlds: The UI of Wndows 7 with the under-the-hood speed and efficiency improvements of Windows 8.

 

System is working great.

Games sail, even on their highest graphical settings. Startup of Windows 8 on the mSATA is blisteringly fast. It's really a pleasure to use.

The last hurdle I'm trying to clear is getting a bluray drive. I purchased this from amazon, and put the Ultrabay DVD drive mounting bracket on it, but it was slightly too think to slide into the Ultrabay.

Has anyone found a bluray drive that they can confirm works, or, alternatively, has anyone figured out a way to buy the Ultrabay bluray drive from Lenovo? Very odd that they won't take my money for one of those things.

 

Awesome, and thanks for the tip. I'm a CAD user and most of what I care about (for work purposes) will only really work with the Start Menu or many desktop shortcuts. I need an updated mobile machine to push multiple monitors and deal with compute-intensive algorithms, but none of this software will make use of any W8 UI "improvements" - most of it hasn't had a facelift in 10+ years anyway, and even looks a little Win95ish.

I typically upgrade within the T series (on a T400 now) but the Y500 gets me what I need at HALF the price. I'll miss the TrackPoint, but I won't miss it enough to spend $1k for, effectively, that one feature. If IPS screens were still available, maybe I'd pay; if ultrabooks could do 16GB, maybe; otherwise, the Y500 seems like the best of what's out right now.

 

I've now tried ordering this Bluray drive for my Ultrabay. Fingers crossed.

 

I have been using Classic Shell, its free.

 

No problem. There's nothing worse than having a new OS interfere with your workflow and actually decrease productivity. I can't imagine going back to Metro now after getting acclimated to StartIsBack.

 

When you get one of these machines, do you have to do that kind of mini setup of windows (putting in language, etc etc) and then it finishes it's installation? I ask as I have only ever bought one new machine before and that was a few years back and a Windows XP model.

I was just wondering how much stuff is needed to be done before you can check the trackpad version?

I am tempted to order from Amazon today, but even as recently as last week (here in the U.K) people were receiving models with the older faulty trackpad. I just don't want to faff about opening it up, finalising a windows installation, and only then seeing that it has the naff trackpad. But I am guessing I will have to?

Thanks.

 

Yes you will have to load into Windows before you can check your touchpad model. Thankfully, Windows 8 has the fastest installation and setup of any Microsoft OS to date. If I install from a USB 3.0 flash drive I think I can do the whole thing in 5 minutes. That's got to be a world record.

 

Thanks for the reply. I gave another retailer a call who had been stocking the cheaper i5 model. They are expecting the i7 model imminently, so I think I'll wait rather than chance that I get a good one delivered. That way I can visit the local store and check the manufacture date before taking it home

In my opinion Lenovo should have been recalling any older models, save people like Amazon posting them out to customers.

 

Ran the 3dmark 11 but results are in X123xx format instead of p123xx.
Whats this result i caN'T understand...cant compare with others in this forum

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

It's because you're using the Extreme preset not the Performance preset.

 

yes, you are right. thank you for advise bro
got my results...but i had a small doubt i overclocked core to 1200mhz but its showing core clock as 405mhz what dwould be the problem?
but memory shows correctly as overclocked..

here the results NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3630QM Processor,LENOVO INVALID score: P3227 3DMarks

 

Don't worry about it; that's just a 3DMark 11 reporting error. It does that to everyone unless they are overclocking with forced p-states in Nvidia Inspector.

Your scores look about right, but with ThrottleStop your Physics score will go up to 7600. You probably already knew that though.

 

And another bluray drive won't fit. Darn. Why won't Lenovo just sell me this darn thing?!?!

Has anyone managed to find a bluray drive that will work?

 

Wouldn't it be much easier to just ask people who bought it with the included Blu-ray drive what part it is so you can order the exact same thing?

Also, the model and part numbers for every single component is listed in the Y400/Y500 hardware maintenance manual. It literally took me 30 seconds to locate the two Blu-ray drives that Lenovo uses. One of them is the Panasonic UJ262 and the other one is the Hitachi-LG Data Storage BU10N.

 

I just finished my "SSD conversion" from a stock Y500 i7-3630QM SLI with the 16GB Samsung mSATA and 1TB Seagate HDD. Pretty sweet.

I had no luck using the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to burn my W8 ISO to my Transcend 32GB USB 3 stick. It burned the ISO to DVD just fine (on my desktop) but I can't install from DVD. I tried a couple of other tools which failed as well.

I succeeded with ISO To USB: ISO to USB

Replacing the 16GB mSATA with 64GB Crucial was as easy as has been described here and elsewhere. I didn't end up busting any tabs off the lid, but the mSATA clamshell packaging provided a nice pliable shim (better than credit card). Glad to have been warned of this.

With only the mSATA in place (removed HDD) the Y500 booted from the USB stick with no need to change any BIOS settings. And this is where my face starts to melt: after the first clicks (select language etc) the installer copied all files to mSATA, installed everything, rebooted once at 3:00, rebooted again at 3:55 and was prompting me for my screen color choice at 4:05. Four minutes for install is pretty amazing. I didn't even get my SSD unpacked in this time.

Likewise, booting from mSATA, I'm entering my password at 5-7 seconds after power-on. It's a fresh install, so after it gets crufted up I suppose this will drift out, but it's clearly a new world order. I realize W8 is still mid-boot at this point. Still impressed.

I'll finish up by adding back my 256GB SSD (for most of the program storage) and dropping my 1TB HDD into the Ultrabay caddy.

The one thing I will gripe about is some design evil, compounded by sloppy assembly: my Ultrabay GPU got its lid all crinkled around the fan. This is the part that faces up toward the keyboard, and there's an opposing metal contour that probably crumpled this part of the GPU fan housing when the unit was assembled. The fan spins freely and I don't think it's more than a cosmetic issue at present, but on a unit with worse attention to assembly/QC, this crumple could indeed get in the way of the GPU fan.

 

Nice! I had the same boot time with a fresh install of Windows 7 on a cheapo 120gb mushkin enhanced chronos sata3 ssd. It's amazing stuff, boots before you even have time to think about it. Too bad it doesn't wake up from standby at the same speed, lol.

 

I would have to return that part and get a new one, shame on Lenovo for letting that get past their QC dept!! Maybe you could do a video of what you did, would be sweet, that way you could point out the tabs that everyone needs to treat with TLC... Just a thought and Congrats by the way!!!

 

I lifted up my Y500 today and found the bottom left clogged with dust. Now I'm assuming that's an air intake for cooling. I can't seem to find where to take it off to clean or how do I clean it beyond using compressed air to slightly reduce the amount of
dust at the intake port. Any suggestinos?

 

Thanks for sharing the drive numbers. I had not seen those.

Does anyone have the part # for the Bluray drive? I would be greatful if I could get it.

 

Download and read this and you'll never have to come here again:
http://download.lenovo.com/consumer...y400y500_hmm_1st_edition_sep_2012_english.pdf

 

Thanks but... grumpy much?

The FRU No. on that list leads me in circles. Calling Lenovo and trying to order that part lands me at lenovospareparts.com. They also don't have that part in their database.

I think the actual drive in a Y500 machine likely has a different number, which is why I was still asking for it.

 

Ask famerbb on this Lenovo thread. He might have the cross referenced part number.

FRU to Marketing cross-reference tool - comments i... - Lenovo Community

 

Bottom left? On the bottom should be the air intake vent. Apply a vacuum at this intake vent, while using the "Can-of-the-air" blowing all the crud from the copper colored exhaust vent on the side. All the crud should be sucked out by the vacuum. Sort of a "reverse" air flow for cleaning out those packed exhaust screens. I use my normal rug vacuum's hose. I don't know what a "shop vac", with heavy duty sucking power would do to the fan assembly.


Oh, by the way, do this while your machine is turned off.

 

I was being sarcastic. But seriously that hardware manual has helped me out a lot with these sorts of things.

The two drives are the Panasonic UJ262 and HLDS BU10N as I've said before. A Google search turns up a lot of results for the Panasonic but the HLDS is hard to find. You can just buy the Panasonic.

What exactly was wrong with the previous two Blu-ray drives you bought? I have a hard time believing the machine won't accept any standard 9.5 mm tray-loading optical drive.

 

I'm thinking of buying this, but I have a quick question: does the dual Nvidia GPUs need a special driver? I went on Lenovo's website and just saw what seems to be a generic Nvidia driver. Just wondering because if I did get one I was planning on replacing the HDD by an SSD and clean installing.

 

You can use the Nvidia Driver. Right now with the 750M there is only the driver that comes with the laptop. I assume this has SLI enabled. For the 650M you can update to the latest Nvidia driver and enable SLI in the Nvidia settings. It is actually preferred to get the driver from the Nvidia site since it is more up to date. For the 750M they should be adding support soon. At first for the 700M GPUs they only have the 710M and the 730M listed. With the latest beta they added the 740M so I assume 750M is next.

 

First, I hear the tabs are a bit hard to deal with on the bottom. Do you have any tips?
Second, I picked up a 512 SSD (not mSATA). So if I am replacing the existing 1TB drive do I need to see the Secure Boot and the UEFI??

 

Thanks octicpes. The first one I bought before realizing they had to be 9.5mm. The second was listed as 9.5mm, but was 12.7mm when it arrived. Now I'm also fighting with that company about taking it back. Very frustrating.

The UJ262 is pricey, so I'm waiting to see if lenovospareparts.com will actually come through. Their price was only $70.

 

Have some quick questions:

What does the 16GB SSD do? Does it have a big performance increase than not having it?

Do I really need 16GB RAM or is 8GB enough? right now I'm at 8GB, but I wonder if 16GB has a noticeable difference in every day use/gaming

Do I need SLI right off the bat or will I be okay getting the SLI ultrabay drive later on (say in about 3-4 months?)

 

Plastic Tabs: I ran into this as well. Once you unscrew the 9 screws on the bottom of your laptop, deal with the plastic tabs like you would for any plastic-molded casing for electronics. Just gently try to wiggle/pry the plastic case apart, without applying enough force to break / snap off a tab. Sometimes using a thin blade / screwdriver may help, if you need to apply pry pressure on a specific location.


SSD (non-mSATA): Yes, you need to disable Secure Boot and UEFI (and leave them disabled) in your situation. The instructions I wrote up are identical to the sitaution you are in (removing pre-installed 2.5" 1TB HDD and replacing it with a 2.5" 500GB SSD).

The only other tip I can give you is that if the Windows isntaller gives you some message about *unable to create partition" during the Windows install process, then remove the USB flash drive, and insert it into a different USB slot. I recently did another Windows 8 re-install (this time to a 256GB mSATA drive), and ran into that little quirk.

Short version: The 16GB SSD uses something called Intel SRT (Smart Response Technology) to act like a giant memory cache for frequently-accessed data. Wikipedia link.

An SSD can perform up to 200x (as in 20,000%) faster than a traditional mechanical HDD. So the idea is to keep the most frequently-accessed data on the very-fast 16GB of SSD memory, and keep the less-accessed bulk content on the 1TB drive. Intel SRT automatically determines what should go into the 16GB of fast SSD storage, based on your usage & data access patterns.

Yes. Faster in both snythetic and real-world benchmarking situations. Not as good as having all of your storage be fast SSD storage, but certainly better than having all of your storage be slow traditional mechanical HDD storage.
AnandTech | Intel Z68 Chipset & Smart Response Technology (SSD Caching) Review

Short answer: 8GB is enough.
Long answer: 8GB is enough. Get 16GB if you have the opportunity, and if the price is right. Having more RAM is never a bad thing. But I wouldn't say it's critical.

Up to you. You can do either way, depending on how your timing / ship dates / finances are working out.

If it were me, I'd certainly say get SLI from the very start. The only feature that makes the Lenovo Y400 / Y500 attractive is the fact that it has the power of SLI graphics in a relatively portable and inexpensive laptop. If you are going to only use one GPU (even for a few months), then I'd say you'd be better off buying a laptop that is faster, smaller, or cheaper.

 

I will disagree with you just a little here in that I was never able to find a 650M or 750M (is anyone else even using these yet) as cheap as the Lenovo. I would say that Optimus might be the only thing worth paying for in other manufacture's models if that is important to you. Otherwise, the Lenovo is the best bang for the buck even without SLI, and then the option to get SLI later if you want is nice but can drive up the price.

 

If you're gonna do a clean install of Windows 7 or 8 on an SSD I would recommend doing a UEFI installation and, in the case of Windows 8, leaving Secure Boot enabled. Make sure you create UEFI-bootable installation media and format the drive as GPT and install Windows on the first Primary partition. You don't want to lose the speed benefits of UEFI and you might as well get used to it since it is the future.

Also, I have to point out that this laptop does not use Intel Smart Response Technology for the SSD caching since the chipset is missing RAID support. It uses Sandisk-licensed ExpressCache software from Condusiv Technologies.