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Advice regarding W700

W500/W510/W520 and W700/W701 Series
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as.nielo
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Advice regarding W700

#1 Post by as.nielo » Wed Mar 07, 2018 3:33 pm

Hi, weeks ago I got a second hand w700ds. Loaded with Q9300, colorimeter and digitizer... I’ve been looking for one like this for some time. I took it home and put extra 4 gigs of RAM from my old x201, replaced hitachi drive with an SSD. Then I did a fresh install of 7 pro and most recent updates.

After successful installation and dloading recent drives via Lenoo Systemupdate I’ve step upon problems with getting the digitizer driver to work. Everytime I tried to install it the BSOD happened blaming digimon.sys for some funny numbers. The solution was to install driver in safe mode, and to use the downloaded exe, not the installer files that were already extracted to c:\DRIVERS\. For some reason the folder structure was alerted after first install atempt.

Pantone sensor also gave me some troubles but after few reinstalls the original app started to work. If the results are too green or too red or too whatsover repeat the process and do cover your laptop with something, there should be no a single ray of outside light disturbing the calibration.

The second screen works nice providing me with extra space, it’s perfect for reading documentats or ebooks or as extra space for tools and drawers from design apps like adobe cc.

I’m posting this in case someone had to cope with similiar problem and may find this useful. What follows is the stuff I don’t like about this Thinkpad

Today I’ve got a new battery and to my dissapointment the machine shuts down while running power hungry apps. I did a test with Skyrim and it went down, after powering up it wouldn’t load Windows unless pluged to AC. The original battery could handle games but was just a few minutes of power. This one gives me 2hrs of worktime (tested with InDesign) but the game killed it. Could someone explain this symptoms? Should I send the battery back?

There are barely noticable beeps during POST and I have no idea what do they mean. I suspected bad battery but seems its something else.

Last thing, I’ve checked the signs and there is nothing broken on the backside so I think it is not the unit stolen from one of fellows here. I may run diskanalyzer to check for files from previous owner but without signatures or filetypes there is not much to do. In case you read it and wish to check tell me what kind of files to expect on your installation, I can look for them. Actually I may do it anyway in search for personal jpgs and docs stuff of someone else :)

Thats it, I hope someone will provide me with answers. Greetings

as.nielo
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#2 Post by as.nielo » Mon Mar 26, 2018 3:35 am

Some update on recent findings
  • the battery was indeed in bad shape and went back for replacement.It has even melted a little near contacts. I'm waiting for a new one
  • The strange silent beep alarm is still there and I have no idea what's wrong
  • it's possible to install OSX Sierra on this thinkpad
To elaborate on OSX, this weekend I managed to cook working install USB stick an installed it on seperate partition on SSD drive. The NVIDIA card works OOB, kind of - the screen goes up only after the laptop wakes from sleep. Webcam works OOB. After some trials I managed to get audio and LAN working. I havent tested second display and external ports yet. I doubt the card reader would ever make it. As for the tablet, there are Wacom drivers for OSX avaliable online but builtin tablet uses different IDs. I have it extracted and waiting to transplant into kexts. Same with the Pantone.

The WLAN won't work unless another card is installed. This needs whitelisted BIOS.The LAN driver has some issues but it's managable.

Jus a curiosity but man how nice it looks. I really like the OSX fullscren mode for apps.

In case I made progress on SierraOS I would post again in right section At the moment I posted this looking for advice regarding my battery and strange beeps

RealBlackStuff
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#3 Post by RealBlackStuff » Mon Mar 26, 2018 5:46 am

Boot into Windows, then turn up the audio-volume, test using Control Panel/Sound/Sounds tab.
When you boot next time you should hear those beeps.

As for battery problems, that machine is about 10 years old, made in only small quantity, the same applies to the battery.
The 'latest' one (from 2014) would be a 9-cell 37++ with FRU 45J7914, see https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/migr-70662

As for WLAN, get a modded BIOS with Whitelist removed, and added Slic2.1 (for Vista and W7): https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread- ... al-request
Lovely day for a Guinness! (The Real Black Stuff)
Lenovo: X240, X250, T440p, T480, M900 Tiny.

PS: the old Boardroom website is still available on the Wayback Machine
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as.nielo
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#4 Post by as.nielo » Tue Mar 27, 2018 11:43 am

Thanks for answer!
RealBlackStuff wrote:
Mon Mar 26, 2018 5:46 am
Boot into Windows, then turn up the audio-volume, test using Control Panel/Sound/Sounds tab.
When you boot next time you should hear those beeps.
Doesn’t help. It is two series of five maybe four short beeps while the laptop boots, second one just before bootloader kicks in.
RealBlackStuff wrote: As for battery problems, that machine is about 10 years old, made in only small quantity, the same applies to the battery.
The 'latest' one (from 2014) would be a 9-cell 37++ with FRU 45J7914, see https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/migr-70662
I have ordered a third party battery. They are not as good as OEMs but they do their work.
RealBlackStuff wrote: As for WLAN, get a modded BIOS with Whitelist removed, and added Slic2.1 (for Vista and W7): https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread- ... al-request
I have updated the BIOS to the latest version and Windows doesn’t mako any problems with activation so I don’t need it.

lsif gives me a list of devices and there are 2 controllers for usb 2 and 4 controllers for usb 1. I think that this legacy interfaces are used for tablet and colorimeter. Making it work under OSX seems more tricky.

as.nielo
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#5 Post by as.nielo » Tue Apr 17, 2018 8:00 am

Sooo, three batteries later I start to believe that shutdown issue is common with third party batteries. I tested cells from different sources and noone could provide me with constant power supply above 80W. In every test case the laptop shuts down if some heavy processing kicks in (no matter if cpu or gpu) and battery is very hot near the negative contact.

RealBlackStuff
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#6 Post by RealBlackStuff » Tue Apr 17, 2018 8:18 am

The 5 beeps might come from a dying CMOS battery, but could also have something to do with Intel's shoddy ME.
Can you disable that in BIOS?
Quite often the beeps go away.
Lovely day for a Guinness! (The Real Black Stuff)
Lenovo: X240, X250, T440p, T480, M900 Tiny.

PS: the old Boardroom website is still available on the Wayback Machine
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as.nielo
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Joined: Sat Sep 30, 2017 1:46 pm
Location: EU

Re: Advice regarding W700

#7 Post by as.nielo » Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:30 am

Beeps were related to the dvd drive. When absent or replaced by the hdd bay the beeps are gone.

I’ve run some intel tests released after recent leaks and to my bf relief my ME is not affected. But just in case I did took out the wlan and bluetooth modules. To go online I plug an usb wlan adapter in.

as.nielo
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#8 Post by as.nielo » Sun Oct 28, 2018 11:44 am

Bumping this thread up. Just in case it went unnoticed. My w700ds shuts down if working on battery. I suspect the shutdown is related to power demand as it happens every time I run something processing intensive, no matter if it’s GPU or CPU work. After the shutdown battery is hot near pin one pin, you can see the plastic melting there.

Up to now the only way to mitigate this behavior is to reduce the power consumption. I have designed a ULV profile for my laptop utilizing downclocking of both CPU and GPU. Reported power consumption stays below 50 W with these settings and the lapto works all the way down to battery critical but it comes on cost of functionality, web browsing lags not to mention more intensive tasks.

One would say just accept it and work plugged in but this has a serious disadvantage - keeping this huge brick attached to both laptop and wall plug is such big waste of electricity.

<TL;DR>To the point

There is a very long thread on official lenovo forum regarding very similar issue with w520 or w540. In that case the issue was related to grounding (lack of) while running on battery. Small case tweak allowed to avoid electric charge accumulation. The RAM cover had small metal pins that had to be extended in order to bring back the conductivity at the screening circuity. I did same thing on my laptop but unfortunately it improved nothing.

I wonder if there are other spots with weak grounding and if it makes any sense to try and look for them. To my understanding grounding in one place doesn’t necessarily mean the whole thing is shielded - as there breaks may exist. Where to look for? Is the charger neutral combined with the zero to shield the laptop? Confusing... Any advice would be very welcome.

as.nielo
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Re: Advice regarding W700

#9 Post by as.nielo » Tue Feb 12, 2019 7:34 am

After testing this system a bit with debian I must say that the power consumption is reduced twicefold and the restarts problem dissapered. So it is related either to low battery performance that can’t handle demand bigger than ~75 Watt (Linux never went over this much) or Windows drivers.

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