W520: Frequent Hangs, Sleep Failures, POST Loops

[bmwman91]

Hello everyone,
I have a W520 as my primary work machine, running BIOS 1.40. I don't recall exactly when my issues started popping up, but it may have been around the time that I updated the BIOS.

Issues include:
- Occasional hangs in Windows during normal tasks (screen freezes, no errors or BSOD, I need to hold the power button down to reboot)
- Failure to resume from sleep (hitting the power button instantly turns off the machine so I end up rebooting)
- Closing the lid sometimes results in black screen when I reopen it (HDD activity light blinks, but keyboard/mouse input do nothing)
- Sometimes after one of the above failures, I hit the power button to turn the machine on and it gets stuck cycling in the pre-POST state (LED flashes, DVD drive makes the clicking noises, I end up having to pull the battery)
- Once or twice I have picked up / moved the laptop and that instantly powered off / rebooted it.

So, has anyone else run into these problems? It doesn't seem like a Windows driver issue since the problems also manifest in the pre-Win state. The only symptom that really concerns me is the last one (picking it up causes reboot) since that screams "damaged motherboard" to me, but I have fiddled with it thoroughly and can't get it to repro that one. Anyway, I want to try downgrading to BIOS 1.26. A lot of fixes were implemented between 1.26 and 1.40, but since 1.26 worked fine as far as I can remember, maybe it is a non-issue.

Thanks!

[Brad]

Sorry you are having trouble.

The Samsung SSD software could cause some of those sleep issues if you are using it.

Check this thread here on the Lenovo forum regarding the shutting off issue.

Brad

[basketb]

Hello everyone,
I have a W520 as my primary work machine, running BIOS 1.40. I don't recall exactly when my issues started popping up, but it may have been around the time that I updated the BIOS.

Issues include:
- Occasional hangs in Windows during normal tasks (screen freezes, no errors or BSOD, I need to hold the power button down to reboot)
- Failure to resume from sleep (hitting the power button instantly turns off the machine so I end up rebooting)
- Closing the lid sometimes results in black screen when I reopen it (HDD activity light blinks, but keyboard/mouse input do nothing)
- Sometimes after one of the above failures, I hit the power button to turn the machine on and it gets stuck cycling in the pre-POST state (LED flashes, DVD drive makes the clicking noises, I end up having to pull the battery)
- Once or twice I have picked up / moved the laptop and that instantly powered off / rebooted it.

So, has anyone else run into these problems? It doesn't seem like a Windows driver issue since the problems also manifest in the pre-Win state. The only symptom that really concerns me is the last one (picking it up causes reboot) since that screams "damaged motherboard" to me, but I have fiddled with it thoroughly and can't get it to repro that one. Anyway, I want to try downgrading to BIOS 1.26. A lot of fixes were implemented between 1.26 and 1.40, but since 1.26 worked fine as far as I can remember, maybe it is a non-issue.

Thanks!

Don't know about the W520 (and hope it's not a systemic problem for this series, as I just got one for myself) but the symptoms in bold are what we experienced with our two T61p before the graphic chips/motherboards went south.

[Brad]

I would say 138 plus page thread regarding the W520 shutting down could possibly be considered systemic.

Brad

[bmwman91]

Sorry you are having trouble.

The Samsung SSD software could cause some of those sleep issues if you are using it.

Check this thread here on the Lenovo forum regarding the shutting off issue.

Brad

Holy moly....136 pages. Yeah, time to talk to the IT guy about switching machines lol.

I downgraded to BIOS 1.26 and *knocks on wood* the issues seem to have gone away. There is no Samsung SSD software installed on the machine, either.

[bmwman91]

Alrighty, for whatever reason I seemed to be having wifi connectivity issues when I went back to 1.26. So, I read around the Lenovo forum thread and decided to re-flash 1.40. Based on some advice from the other forum, I bent the metal EMI fingers inside the RAM cover so that they would actually make contact with the EMI ground pads. I guess that the cover was not properly grounded with the original cover and ESD events could cause all sorts of stability issues.

So, I will report back in a week or so to see if running BIOS 1.40 with the "fixed" RAM cover grounding resolved my weird freeze issues.

[bmwman91]

OK, it has been a while!

Thus far, reliability seems to be greatly improved. Since my last post, I have had two hiccups, both of which were yesterday. I got an instant hard reboot when I plugged in a VGA cable in a conference room, and then the laptop froze for seemingly no reason when I was typing. Sadly, this is a heck of a lot better than it was before I modified the EMI fingers.

Despite this, I had our IT department order up a max-spec X230 with the IPS screen. I loaded Pro/Engineer on a coworker's X230 and the HD4000 GPU handles mid-size assemblies well enough that it can effectively replace my W520. Since I don't write/compile code or deal with massive numerical simulations, I probably won't miss the W520's larger computing power. Since I travel 30-40 times a year for work now, the X230 will be very welcome...the W520 doesn't fit all that well on seat-back trays!