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New owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 12:22 am
by Masi_K
Hello.
I'm probably shifting over from my current T61 to W520. I've having it here for test and I ran to two issues. Is either gma hd or quaddro 1000m capable of running youtube etc at 1080p @ 60hz? This unit has a lot of issues. Intel side plays only first seconds of the video, but sound plays along nicely.. When I force quaddro to be the only gpu from nvidia panel videos starts to play but pretty far from perfect. Every ads what comes to screen every now and then jerks framerate badly. Sometimes I even get picture issues in video and not anywhere else on screen. But when everything goes okay from the beginning of the video, it starts to play it more evenly. But it is still not the same smoothness what I got on my desktop pc wich has a lot of more gpu.

Second issue is with the windows sticker under battery. It is branded to Lenovo and microsoft didn't allow me to download oem software. What to do? I somehow guessing that mentioned video issues is related to this for selling purpose windows 7 install.

Installed newest optimus drivers what lenovo site has to offer. With them I'm at this stage. :D

W520 is 4276

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 2:45 am
by Tasurinchi
My guess the issue is due to under optimized OS install/gpu drivers.

I have two T520 with Intel only GPU's and both play FHD videos without a single issue, one with Win7 Pro (using Windows drivers) and the other with Debian Jessie.

My W510 with Nvidia GPU (an older generation than yours) and Debian Jessie has also no issues playing FHD movies and FHD trailers from Youtube.

All three machines have FHD panels.

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 2:48 am
by RealBlackStuff
Driver-problems are most likely.
Also do a proper memtest of the RAM. http://www.memtest.org/
As for W7, get a set of Lenovo's W7-Pro 64-bit Recovery Disks.
Either buy from Lenovo (~$50) or put a WTB in our Marketforum.

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 7:15 am
by TPFanatic
You may find that Youtube's HTML 5 player is the source of choppy framerate and poor playback. I had this annoying issue, I needed to use my T500's Radeon graphics to get only 720. It seemed wrong so I did some research. With T500's graphics,

Intel GMA 4500:
- HTML 5 player is choppy in full screen, any quality.
- Runs smoothly only in small window

ATI Radeon 3650:
- HTML 5 player is choppy in 1080, any screen size
- Runs up to 720 smoothly


I don't know what's the correct way to do it, I installed a Firefox addon to use Youtube's Adobe Flash player and now both GMA 4500 and Radeon 3650 play 1080 videos, full screen, as they are advertised to do.

Youtube (and the rest of the web) love making not-the-latest-and-the-greatest computers look slow.

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 7:44 am
by brchan
Use chrome for watching youtube and media content (including html5). This gave me the single biggest improvement in performance. Don't know why, but Firefox is just much choppier. In fact, only on single core systems does firefox seem to be more responsive. If you haven't already, set the power mode to 'performance' and update gpu drivers.

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 3:14 pm
by Masi_K
Oh yes! we were all right about faulty windows and or driver install. I managed to install fresh, genuine and clean win10 from usb stick.
Now html5 works great even with intel 3000 chip. It doesn't even get hot anymore when idle and doing basic stuff.

This leads me to another question. I'm trying to color calibrate integrated display. Colors are truly over bright. I can not achieve gamma 2.2. It is alvays way off. No matter what I do. Is there some setting to it ? Black level, white saturation and contrast are good. Atleast to this gamma level.

As of test material. I use this http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 6:43 pm
by ajkula66
There are several profiles for these panels floating the web, I remember some of them being posted on Lenovo Forum as well as on NBR.

You could start a new thread in this section asking about a calibrated profile, someone around here is bound to have it.

Good luck.

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 2:23 am
by Tasurinchi
There are some profiles on the German Wiki, scroll down to the end of this page

Re: Possible new owner of w520

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 10:13 am
by Masi_K
Thank you. Now picture is so much better. Slightly blueish but easily acceptable.

Corrected subject too.. :D

Re: New owner of w520

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 12:05 pm
by Tasurinchi
Masi_K wrote:Slightly blueish but easily acceptable.
I Agree! Still much better than a not calibrated one, the panels I had without calibration were to whitish for my taste.
Masi_K wrote:Corrected subject too.. :D
Congrats! With enough RAM and SSDs this machine will serve you well for years to come!

Re: New owner of w520

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 2:36 pm
by Masi_K
Thanks. It has 16gig ram and I swapped to an ssd when installed win10. Also bought sata ultrabay adapter for the 500gig spinning one.

Re: New owner of w520

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2016 3:57 pm
by theterminator93
These also have an mSATA slot under the keyboard (assuming you don't have WWAN) for a third storage device. It's limited to SATA-II whereas the 2.5" bay is SATA-III though.

Re: New owner of w520

Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2016 5:20 am
by Pokrzept
Guys if you want to watch high-definiton content on your older thinkpads I may recommend you installing SMTube+SMPlayer combo available for both windows and linux OS. It also may be configured to run videos directly in VLC player. I do use it on my A31ps and R50p and it work like a charm on such a vintage hardware.

Re: New owner of w520

Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2016 12:42 pm
by Masi_K
theterminator93 wrote:These also have an mSATA slot under the keyboard (assuming you don't have WWAN) for a third storage device. It's limited to SATA-II whereas the 2.5" bay is SATA-III though.
Okay. This don't have wwan. That would be nice addon to allready cool machine.


Is there way to make hotkey features work on 64bit win10 ? 8.0 software didn't work (of course. had to try it still).