Weirdest problem. Suddenly out of nowhere my Windows 7 is acting up on my W520.
It starts up fine, but hangs for like 2 full minutes on a blank black screen right after the windows welcome screen loads.
You can move the cursor around, but it won't login to Windows for like 2 minutes. It just stays frozen on a blank black screen.

I've never seen this before in my life. It's completely stumped me. I've done memory diagnostics, SSD diagnostic, even ran a full system scan using PC Doctor, seems like everything is fine. It's got to be an O.S issue. I would use system restore, but I deleted the restore files last week. Seems like Windows hasn't made a new restore point.

Anyone have any suggestions?

My instinct would be to use a Linux OS disk to get a working system so you can copy any files from windows to an external hard drive. Then I'd try using R&R to restore windows to an earlier date. If that doesn't work then, having backed everything up as in paragraph one using Linux, I'd do a factory restore. If you haven't created your factory restore disks you might be up the creek without a paddle.

It eventually loads windows just takes 2 minutes.
Very odd.

Issue fixed. Found an old Rescue Recover Backup on one of my old HDD, and voila a clean image ghosting and the problem was solved.
Too bad, we will never find the root of the problem.
Windows is just so *****Expletives removed by Moderator***** buggy.
Almost makes me wanna switch to Mac.

Lesson to future Thinkpadders, always keep an old rescue recover backup of your system running in peak condition, you never know when Windows will crap out for no good reason.

Thank god for Thinkvantage tools.

For your reading pleasure...

http://superuser.com/questions/256721/w ... oubleshoot
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 0c38103c0/
http://blogs.technet.com/b/instan/archi ... delay.aspx

My hunch is Intel Matrix Storage driver.

These guys seem to experience a hang during the windows boot screen with the Windows Welcome Logo.
What I was experience was the blank black screen that comes after the Windows Welcome Logo has already loaded.

On a normal Win 7. There should be only a 1 second gap between the Welcome Screen ending and the Login Screen appearing, during this 1 second a blank black screen is shown.
Usually you won't even notice it cause it comes and goes so quick.

But for me the blank black screen was there for 2-3 minutes.

From my experience, it is "Lenovo welcome". When I originally purchased my thinkpad it was installed and I noticed that problem. I did a clean install from retail disk and the problem was gone.