Thinkpads Forum

Is there someone who is already running Windows 10 on W520?

If so, are there any issues like fingerprint reader or Power Manager or whatever not working properly?

Thanks

There should be built in drivers for the fingerprint reader. I highly doubt the Power Manager software will install, but you can give it a try. Honestly, I've run Windows 10 on my T410 and detected everything including the fingerprint reader and ran flawlessly. I'm running Windows 8.1 Pro and Linux now until 10 officially releases, then it will be 10 Pro and Linux.

I have run Technical Preview on a T420, and everything works, except the Power Manager. It refused to install in any compatibility mode I tried. I will try it again as soon as I get my hands on the official Win10 release. Power Manager Driver installed ok, though. A shame really, as the Power Manager is really useful system software. I miss the ability to see the battery status, and the ability to change charging thresholds.

Has anybody found any other Lenovo / ThinkVantage utility that takes care of that?

Norway Pad wrote:I have run Technical Preview on a T420, and everything works, except the Power Manager. It refused to install in any compatibility mode I tried. I will try it again as soon as I get my hands on the official Win10 release. Power Manager Driver installed ok, though. A shame really, as the Power Manager is really useful system software. I miss the ability to see the battery status, and the ability to change charging thresholds.

Has anybody found any other Lenovo / ThinkVantage utility that takes care of that?

I could not get Windows 10 to recognize or install power manager either. I suspect Lenovo will have Windows 10 drivers for the all the legacy Thinkpads that came with Windows 7.

In a link that was posted in a recent thread here, it appeared like Lenovo's first specific Win10 drivers / system software didn't cover anything before Tx30. But I sure hope it in the future could include something for the Tx20 and maybe Tx10 as well. At least a working Power Manager and/or system software that could communicate with the battery.

Norway Pad wrote:I have run Technical Preview on a T420, and everything works, except the Power Manager. It refused to install in any compatibility mode I tried.

This - apart from other bugs that I've been reading about when it comes to W10 - makes the OS in question an absolute non-starter for silly old me.

That is a pitty, I can not see myself without the Power Manager utility, it's a really smart piece of software as it keeps my battery from being ruined. I hope they will sort it out somehow.

If only the W520 wasn't 4 years old. It is in the perfect sweetspot of power, price, and not being ruined by Lenovo...

Except of course the stupid 16:9 screen and the bugged Optimus implementation, limiting external screens to two.

Typing this on W520 docked to 30", 20". On the other side of the 30" is another 20".. turned off, since Lenovo screwed up that monitor thingy. The much cheaper T520 works right in that aspect though; it does support 3 external screens.

Since you also use the W520 on dock: I just found out a nice way to get decent audio-out on the W520 docked; This Dell U3014 (*don't buy it!) in front of me apparently had an audio-out jack hiding on it's back... This way the audio-out is free from the noise and cracking sound what constitutes the dock' audio-out jack.

Never appeared to me before.

*inputlag in all modes except game-mode... and in game mode there is no hardware LUT and the colors are screwed. Also the overshoot is ridiculous on this thing. Dell should update the 30" with the sane ideas they implemented on the *15 monitors. Like fix that overshoot, dump PWM completely etc.
The only real good thing is it's resolution; 2560x1600. It's like getting your paycheck w/o deducted taxes; so much better than 16:9. Too bad it's 2x the price of an otherwise much better Dell U2715.

Sleepy664 wrote:
If only the W520 wasn't 4 years old. It is in the perfect sweetspot of power, price, and not being ruined by Lenovo...

Unless you *really* need a stronger GPU, W520 should check most of the boxes compared with the newer systems...

It could use a 3:2 screen, the power consumption improvements of newer hardware and Displayport 1.2

jcvjcvjcvjcv wrote:It could use a 3:2 screen, the power consumption improvements of newer hardware and Displayport 1.2

Indeed it could...however:

a) I'm not aware of any workstation-class system that sports a 3:2 panel...

b) Personally, I'm more than willing to sacrifice power consumption and DP 1.2 in order to keep the classic keyboard...

My $0.02 only...

I'm fine with 16:9, I've got used to it (even my desktop LCD is 16:9). And I have the Taskbar set so it hides automatically so it doesn't take up vertical space.

Better graphics would be nice...but 2000M is enough for me now and I don't want to sacrifice a good keyboard. Good keyboard is a must For me, the W520 is the last of a breed.

Getting audio out of the LCD is a neat idea, I'm not sure I have this option on my BenQ BL2710 (buy it, it's really nice! ...I bought mine slighly used for half the price...). But looking at pictures online it seems It has some audio out jack for headphones I'll have to try that.
(That headphone holder on the back makes more sense to me now... )

Oh yes, the classic keyboard; absolutely. That's why I bought a W520 and not a W530.

I don't know about any workstation laptop with 3:2 either, neither of 16:10. Both are however superior to 16:9. I know the MacBook Pro has a beautiful 16:10 screen. However, the other aspects of that machine make it unusable for me.

BenQ BL2710 is not for me; it has too much inputlag.

The BL2710's input lag depends on who measured it.

If you trust Germans, on Prad.de they measured 0.9 ms. (http://www.prad.de/new/monitore/test/20 ... Latenzzeit)
On TFT Central they claim 25 ms.
And I've also seen 18 ms measured.

Maybe I'll find some old CRT and I'll try to measure it myself.

jcvjcvjcvjcv wrote:Oh yes, the classic keyboard; absolutely. That's why I bought a W520 and not a W530.

I know...

I don't know about any workstation laptop with 3:2 either, neither of 16:10. Both are however superior to 16:9. I know the MacBook Pro has a beautiful 16:10 screen. However, the other aspects of that machine make it unusable for me.

QFT, instead of wasting everyone's time on elaborating on the matter at hand any further...

Has anybody tried something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Disp ... B00OPI0XS2

I have a friend running displaylink on a macbook with good results, but that's a whole other thing...

I've made my upgrade yesterday and it looks like almost everything is working fine.

The Power Manager is unable to set „optimize for battery lifespan“ mode. And it doesn't power on by using fingerprint – can't really tell why. But not a big deal for me.

And the taskbar doesn't remember it's size between reboots but I think that could be solved by doing a clean install...which I'll do sometimes later.


After little bit of hacking (disabling logon screen backgrounds and so on) I'm now more than satisfied

That "optimize for battery lifespan" didn't work to begin with. On my W520 with W7 it worked for like 4 months. Then it said that it switched to maximum runtime mode and it never went back. Now I manually set battery limits. Meaning I usually forget to limit it or de-limit it...

But after 3 years, 1/3 of the capacity is gone, so I kinda need it at 100% a bit more than when it was new.

upgrade to win 10. has some difficulty with freezing on installation, but manages to install with intel vt-d turned off in the bios setting.
After that format harddrive, do clean install of win 10

So far runs excellent. Battery mode works fine too

Boot to windows just about 5 second using hdd 7200rpm. love it

Is the T520 or T420 or x220 affected by the same issue, since they should if the processor is the problem ?

Are people having issues running in UEFI+GPT or Legacy BIOS+MBR mode ?
you can find out which one you have by inspecting the partition table in computer management.
http://thpc.info/how/gpt_or_mbr.html

nvm, posted to wrong thread.

I'm having trouble upgrading my W520 to Windows 10. I'm using the recover files and software option. I have been able to get it upgraded but have encountered a video problem. The nVidia driver loads okay (I presume as it's listed ok in the device manager) but the OS doesn't recognize the Intel HD Graphics 3000 (not listed in device manager). Anyone been able to upgrade a W520 - what are the tricks?
Bob

BobA wrote:I'm having trouble upgrading my W520 to Windows 10. I'm using the recover files and software option. I have been able to get it upgraded but have encountered a video problem. The nVidia driver loads okay (I presume as it's listed ok in the device manager) but the OS doesn't recognize the Intel HD Graphics 3000 (not listed in device manager). Anyone been able to upgrade a W520 - what are the tricks?
Bob

I sure hope there's an easy fix for this ......I'm trying to decide whether to go to W10 from 7Pro before the July deadline.

For those wanting to install Power Manager in Windows 10.

Follow these instructions which I found on another forum but I posted on this forum a few months ago.

Install the Windows 10 Assessment and Deployment Kit ( adksetup for Windows 10) from Microsoft (when you install Windows ADK, choose only Application Compatibility Toolki (ACT))
From the start menu, run the Compatibility Administrator, either the 32-bit or the 64-bit version depending on your application
In the left-hand pane under System Database (32/64-bit) -> Applications, look for the corresponding application "Power Manager"
In the large pane on the right-hand side there should be an entry AppHelp - HARDBLOCK
Right-click the exe-file with the hard block and select Disable entry
Now you should be good to go. In my case I additionally had to set the program to run in Windows 7 compatibility mode.

This worked for me and I have applied it to 5 Thinkpads without any issues.

To those who can answer before the July deadline -- was it worth the risk to your W520?

hatman wrote:To those who can answer before the July deadline -- was it worth the risk to your W520?

I didn't bother so far. And I won't for at least two weeks to come.

If I do make the step, I will do it on approximately 5 PC's. Or maybe 6. The almost-never-used T61 still has an XP install that's 8 years old.

If things don't work well, I will simply make a bootable USB stick on the Windows server, boot from that, and restore _everything_ to how it was in the last backup, all over Gbit LAN.

Unfortunately I didnt upgrade to win10. I installed from usb stick clean install. It has been working since. Synaptics drivers automatically updated few days ago and now screen rolling works as it should. Both nvidia and intel graphics works. Downloaded latest driver from nvidia. Later on I disabled whole nvidia from bios to get rid of screen flickering during gpu change even when forced to intel or viceversa. Hotkey features doesn't work. There is no driver to it.

So no bigies here. Remember to connect to internet when running install. Otherwise it will stay on loop asking same questions for ever

No hotkeys... that's a pretty major issue!?

I have been using Win10 on my W510 for quite a while now, and I am quite pleased except for the [censored] upgrades all the time. Coming from an XP machine then to Win7 on this laptop, I cannot say that I am missing anything that I had before. I I no longer run on battery - it stopped functioning about a year ago, so I don't really know if Power Manager is working or not. I tried to download Lenovo Tools, but that was a failure, and I have not tried to do that for almost 6 or 8 months now. all in all, I am pleased. Win7 was a very good OS, and I think I can say the same for Win10 on this machine.

jcvjcvjcvjcv wrote:No hotkeys... that's a pretty major issue!?

I meant to say that most of them doesn't work..

W10 on the W520...

End of Day 1; 1:20 (hours:minutes) battery remaining. Then laptop to sleep
Start of Day 2; 6% remaining, back to sleep within 2 minutes of boot.

What !? I've never seen such energy draw during sleep with W7

Battery is 30% worn 9-cell.