BLUE SCREEN Lenovo Thinkpad W520 . HARDWARE SOLVED.

[Axu21]

Hello to all,

I bought last year my fourth Thinkpad W520 (4276-3LU) from B&H NY (I7-2860QM, 1920x1080 HD, 2x4 8Gb 1333MHz, 500gb 7200rpm). I upgraded with 2 DIMMs (2x4Gb Kingston 1333Mhz) to 16 gb and with a Crucial SSD M4 256gb.
Despite one dead pixel on the new pristine screen, the upgraded machine worked excellent for more than half year until i received BLUE SCREEN. Putting the original configuration and recovering software to the factory state i received BLUE SCREEN again!
By filling each 4gb memory on DIMM 0 socket under the keyboard and checking with Thinkvantage diagnostics tool i discovered a dead memory DIMM (Hynix 4GB-1333MHz, 2Rx8 PC3-10600S-9-11-F3, HMT351S6CFR8C-H9 N0 AA, Korea). Cleaning pins, still dead under testing with Memtest x86 soft on another laptop.
Using 12gb (3x4gb DIMMs) now the machine works great.

Occasionally by playing in turbo mode NFS-The Run, i wonder if the soldering paste on the cheap quality Hynix memory was melted...or the heat sink processor could not taken the heat generated in DIMM (lenovo design error). Note that copper radiator on the left side has changed over time and became from copper color to black one due to heat generated.

Now i realized i bought a processor, a HD screen, a lenovo motherboard and a still lovely keyboard - nothing else! And the International Lenovo warranty service is on the same korean quality level.

Regards,
Axu21

[Cigarguy]

Glad you found the problem. Most of the time it's due to overheating, abuse or memory issues. RAM is pretty cheap these days and are made cheap. IMO, this is a good thing. Unfortunately the drawback is that it'll fail every once in a while. Considering the complexity of modern computers I'm surprise there is not more failures. You buy a $50, 000 car and can expect a few bugs and a lot of maintenance. We buy $2,000 laptops and expect it to last as long as a car usually with little to no maintenance.