W530 Sleep Nightmares

[PaulaG]

Just purchased brand new W530:
i7-3740QM @ 2.7GHz
16GB RAM
500GB Drive
3G WiFi
K2000 graphics
BIOS 2.53
Windows 7 Professional

Right out of the box with all the latest Windows and BIOS updates applied, the sleep feature works neither correctly nor consistently. It's a disaster.

After putting the machine to sleep (and the power button pulsing slowly), any of these things may happen when I try to wake it up:
1) nothing. It refuses to respond to any keyboard/power button. Only holding down the power button long enough to cause a full system restart/power on has any effect, and it's a reboot.
2) BIOS power on splash screen followed by "Restart Windows". May or may not restore the system to the point when sleep was invoked. Takes close to 5 minutes before machine is usable (HD light on almost all that time)
3) BIOS power on splash screen followed by "WINDOWS SYSTEM ERROR" screen saying Windows did not shut down correctly. Then selecting NORMAL START initiates normal system power up start from scratch.
4) once, and only once, it woke up and went right to the screen where sleep was invoked. This correct behavior has never happened beyond the one and only time.

I have tried all every combination of power settings I can find:
hybrid sleep enable/disable
hibernate enable/disable
CPU deep sleep enable/disable
wake timers enable/disable
30 Day Standby enable/disable

I can use any of the power profiles provided and there is no change.

No combination of changes to the power settings change the behavior EXCEPT disabling hybrid sleep (which is what I want) will almost always cause bad behavior 3.

I need to be able to use sleep frequently and this problem makes the machine almost useless.

I also have new Lenovo Thinkstation desktops w/ i7 CPUs and Win 7 Professional. They go in and out of sleep in seconds with no drama.

Suggestions?

[Cigarguy]

Sounds like a driver/software issue. Take the OS drive out. Swap in a temp HDD. Reload fresh Windows and see if everything works better. Alternatively try a Linux Live distro. If after reloading Windows or running Linux you still encounter the same problems, then you know it's not a software problem but hardware. Being new, if hardware is the problem, I'd return the machine.

[Brad]

I have a similar W530 with the same BIOS.

I don't use sleep. I just tested sleep from the start button then the dropdown menu next to shutdown. My W530 slept in a second. To wake I pressed the Fn button. It woke where it left off in another second.

Brad

[PaulaG]

Thank you Brad. That is the behavior I expect and it is what my Thinkstations and other Thinkpads do.
Cigarguy, that was something I though of doing too but I don't have the time to go through all that right now. If I don't find another way to resolve the problem I will eventually have to do this. I just don't have any more spare HDs lying around at the moment.

There are lots of posts on the net that are non-W530 specific so I'll try some of those proposed solutions and see if any of them fix the problem. If I find anything that works I'll post it here.

[PaulaG]

No Joy.

I formatted a new HD with the Factory Restore image and there is no change. I reset the system BIOS to the defaults. It still will not awaken from a sleep. It jumps to either a normal power-on boot or the Windows Error Recovery screen when I try to wake it up.

Is there a way to perform a BIOS fallback?

[Cigarguy]

Whenever I have hibernation/sleep issue, I've had a lot of good luck using Microsoft's utility for this. If you haven't done so, give it a shot.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730

[PaulaG]

Thank you. Unfortunately that didn't really fix the problem.

After turning hibernate off, then on I was able to put it to sleep and wake it up ... but only once. The 2nd time I put it to sleep it reverted back to its old bad behavior.

I have been able to affect a similar type of one-use "fix" by changing the Swap File from System Managed to User Defined and back. That too has the same effect on the wakeup behavior as hibernate off, on. Unfortunately a single-use fix isn't of much value since as soon as I successfully awaken it the sleep/awake will fail again on the next wakeup.

Also, the hibernate off/on "fix" does not persist if I don't sleep but manually power down, then power up. Upon completing the power up a sleep/awake will again fail as before.

It seems pretty clear that the Windows startup process is loosing track of the fact that the system was put to sleep, and when the power button is hit the startup process treats the event as a normal power-up, only to discover that Windows didn't complete an orderly and complete shutdown (which it didn't because I put it to sleep, I didn't shut it down).

I have seen that sleep/awake can work, but something keeps breaking it and I haven't a clue what. It this appears to be the behavior with the system straight out of the box, with the system restored to as-shipped state, even onto a different physical HD. The only things that I can't rule out at this point is some problem with the BIOS or hardware.

[PaulaG]

Arrrgh

Buying this top of the line Thinkpad W530 is turning into my worst bad dream!

I haven't been able to use this machine since it arrived because a simple sleep simply can not be made to work. But yesterday the fan in my T60 gave out so I have to resort to the W530 until I replace the fan. I switched the W530 over to use hybrid sleep because that seems to work, sort of (takes 4-5 minutes to resume, have to hold down the power button for 10 seconds to wake it, sometimes blue screens a few minutes after resuming).

So here's the next problem with it. It ALWAYS goes into hybrid sleep when I close the lid. I go into Power Manager and select Do Nothing for the 2 Lid Closed events, click apply to see the changes are still there, then click OK and close Power Manager. I reopen Power Manager and the settings have magically changed back to Sleep.

The power management on this machine is pure rubbish! What can possibly be wrong? Should I just send it back and give up on Thinkpads?

[Cigarguy]

Man! You are not having any luck with that machine. It should not be anywhere that difficult. At this stage I would try swapping in a different HDD, doing a fresh install and seeing if that will solve you problems. If you still have the same issues with a fresh install then it's a hardware issue. Regardless, at this point, sending it back is a tempting option.

[rkawakami]

@PaulaG: Please confirm that you are attempting to wake the system out of sleep mode by pressing the Fn key for at least two seconds.

It refuses to respond to any keyboard/power button.

...and when the power button is hit the startup process treats the event as a normal power-up...

[PaulaG]

Cigarguy, I did swap out the HDD and do a full reload from the Lenovo Restore CDs. The behavior did not change.

With sleep/hybrid enabled:
When the Power Light is doing it's slow pulsing indicating sleep, it will usually wake up by pressing the power button or Fn key for 2 seconds.
However, if it sleeps overnight I have to hold the power button down for 10-15 seconds to get its attention. It will then take upwards of 5 minutes with the HDD light on solid most of the time before it will even let me sign in, and then another 3-5 of minutes before the HDD light finally calms down and I can get some reasonable response out of it.

In order to answer this question I pressed Fn/F4 and it went into hybrid sleep in under a minute. Then I pressed Fn for 2 seconds and it woke up but I've been sitting at the Welcome with "Please wait ... Computer is locked" while the HDD light was on for over 5 minutes. Now the HDD light is off but it still says "Please wait ...". I can't get in at all so now I need to power cycle it to get back to a fresh boot.

Now I've done a power cycle and I get the Windows Error Recovery screen where I selected Normal Start and the system is at the sign on screen in 30 seconds. Enter my credentials and I'm good to go in a few more seconds.

Now with sleep/hybrid disabled:
Fn/F4 and it goes right to sleep with the slow pulsing power button within 10 seconds.
Press Fn OR Power and I get Windows Error Recovery Screen and selecting Normal Start brings me to a clean system just as before.

I get the feeling that there is some sort of mismatch between the BIOS and the power manager. I've tried using both the MS powermgr and Lenovo PowerManager. I abandoned using the Lenovo version because it kept slamming the Close Lid event to Sleep (meaning I had a choice of being thown to the Windows Error Recovery screen or waiting up to 10 minutes before I could use it upon lifting the lid).

I've had the machine 1 week. I waited 3 weeks while it was being built and shipped straight from the factory in China. When I got it I applied the recommended BIOS update, all the Lenovo utility updates, and the 100+ Windows 7 updates. Unfortunately I never tried putting it to sleep and waking it until I had started all these things so I don't know if there were problems before that.

I did slap in a new HDD and refresh all the SW to the Factory image but the bad behavior has persisted. The only thing I can't try because I haven't found it is to fallback to the earlier BIOS. Even then I'm not certain if there won't be evil artifact laying in wait is some persistent storage somewhere that is waiting to bite me again.

I fear the machine needs to be completely flatlined and brought back to life by the factory or a service center. I think I've done all I can do. I'm not even sure that can save it. We have another new W530 for another person and it works fine.

I've only purchased ThinkPads for personal use and for my staff since the early 90s and never experienced anything like this. I even backed my car over my trusty old 390X once and after replacing the crushed LCD screen (which still worked in 1 quadrant) it went on to serve me flawlessly for another couple years. It finally developed a minor PCB problem from years of power cycle induced heat stress. It's still usable but may power down unexpectedly if it is bumped.

Okay, just one more time I tried sleep and Fn to awake (still set to sleep/hybernate disabled). This time it woke up and started what looked like a proper restore. I started to get excited. Then I got the blue screen of death. Tried it again, Windows Error Recovery. So frustrating.

I'm a hard core developer and I need all the power I can get out of a machine. I'm also on the move constantly, in and out of a docking station, and so having this feature work is absolutely critical to my daily operation. So for the time being I'll have to stay with the T60 and continue to be mostly desk bound to use my big ThinkCentres for the heavy computing. This really cramps my style.

[rkawakami]

I know this probably won't be what you want to use, but does the system enter and exit hibernation properly?

As long as I've been using Thinkpads, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've used sleep mode. For the systems that I routinely turn off (not this A31p I'm typing on now; it's on 24/7), I always put my systems into hibernation. There have only been a couple of times that a system will blue-screen or otherwise fail to exit hibernation. I'm not counting the instances where I've swapped the hard drive out and put it into another machine or I changed the memory configuration .

Is there a way to perform a BIOS fallback?

You should be able to download older versions of the BIOS update. My preference is to always use a DOS/bootable media to perform BIOS updates, as opposed to doing it from within a running Windows operating system. You probably know that you can download the latest version from this link:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... uj15us.iso

which is what you are running right now (V2.53). Previously, it was easy to find older versions as the Support page would have links to them. You may not know that you can usually get older versions by simply changing the .ISO filename. Using the README.txt file as a guide:

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... uj15uc.txt

the package (ID) names appear to be different in the last two digits: g5uj14us.iso is the previous (V2.52-1.10) version. This seems to go back to the g5uj11us.iso file and then for some reason the name changes to g5uj10uc.iso.

[PaulaG]

Thank you Ray. I use the bootable BIOS updater method too. I'll look for the previous version, download it and give that a try later today.

[Brad]

I would try to move that recovered HDD you created on your W530 that still didn't work in your new W530 to the other W530 that is working as expected to check if it will do what you need. If it does work that would clearly indicate a hardware issue with your new W530 and if it were me I would look to return it and get another W530. If it doesn't work I would clone the HDD from the working W530. Then after confirming correct operation in your second W530 try that same HDD in your W530.

Brad

[PaulaG]

Reverting to 2.52 did not fix the problem.

One other curious behavior that exists regardless of BIOS version.

If I change the swap file configuration in Win 7, reboot, press Fn/F4 it will sleep and awake successfully ONCE. If I then press Fn/F4 and awaken it a second time it will always fail.

The other W530 is on the road so it's not available to play with. Time to call Lenovo.

[PaulaG]

Lenovo replaced the motherboard. All the problems with sleep/wake have gone away.

[rkawakami]

Good to hear. And thanks for reporting back on your fix.

[Brad]

Nice.

Happy ThinkPadding once again.

Brad

[PaulaG]

I'm almost happy again. Now that I thought I could actually use the machine the way I need it to work I now bump into the extremely bizarre way that Duplicate Display works (or should say doesn't work). I've created a new thread on this but I'm not hopeful after reading all the similar threads on the Lenovo forums. I still might end up having to walk around with my nice shiny, fast W530 AND my old T60 because the W530 falls flat on its face when it trips over this very basic and essential function. I miss just being able to plug in a projector, wall mounted flat screen or desktop sharing/conferencing service and press F7. How could they get this so wrong and leave it so broken for at least 3 years?

[kpfalzer]

I too am experiencing the exact same problem with a recently purchased W530.
When I put to sleep via Fn-F4 or Shutdown|Sleep, close the lid, go away
for a few hours.
Then, when I open the lid and try to wake up, the momentary power-button press
nor the fn-F4 or any keys are unable to wake it up.
I end up holding down the power-button to force a restart. That is obvously
not the result I desire.
(Hibernate works fine; but most times all I want is quick wake-up from sleep).

My system specs (from System Information):

OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
System Model W530: 243857U
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
BIOS Version/Date LENOVO G5ET93WW (2.53 ), 5/24/2013
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 16.0 GB
500 GB drive
Intel Gfx 4000 and NVidia Quadro K2000M

I see PaulaG had same issue. It wasn't clear how it was fixed?
Was the system returned to Lenovo for another one w/ "fixed motherboard"?

[Cigarguy]

I see PaulaG had same issue. It wasn't clear how it was fixed?
Was the system returned to Lenovo for another one w/ "fixed motherboard"?

The fix was very clear. Read 4 posts above yours.

[kpfalzer]

I must have mentally filtered out that response thinking it was such a severe fix.
I thought this was a pretty mature product.
I should have listened to my wife who said "buy a mac book".

[wolfman]

I should have listened to my wife who said "buy a mac book".

I'm sure none of those are defective or ever need to be repaired.

[kpfalzer]

I don't doubt there have been defective macs, sure.

We have owned many PCs, notebooks, Macs and even Sun Workstations over these many years and never have I had such a fundamental issue as a busted
sleep mode.

But, seems this issue w/ sleep then is endemic with some latest batch/runs of W530 if a motherboard needed to be replaced?
Sounds like there is no (simple) driver fix/update?

I can't possibly fathom the hassle of trying to ship this thing off for a replacement.
I've already got a VirtualBox/Linux client installed and much data/etc. that would need to be wiped/restored.

I did switch all the close the lid, sleep button, etc. to hibernate --- at least that seems to work.

[wolfman]

I'm not insensitive to your plight, don't take me the wrong way. However, if you Google for "macbook pro sleep issues motherboard replacement" you'll see that they have had similar issues as well (the first link contains a post where someone said their motherboard was replaced 4 times for this issue). It would seem something like this (sleep mode) would be bulletproof for everyone at this point, but it's not unfortunately.

I'd talk with support about options of sending your machine without the hard drive - often that is OK. Also, now might be a good time to go to the Lenovo site and see if you can upgrade your warranty to onsite and then call the tech. Yes, it costs money for onsite warranty, but then they will come to you and do the work so your chances of being left without a machine for a period of time are much higher. This may be worth it to you so that you do not have to wipe / restore.

[kpfalzer]

Hi wolfman,
I appreciate all your insights and suggestions.
At this time, I have removed the Lenovo Power Manager -- leaving just the plain ole windows one.
I'll see if that has any affect.
I did a little research on the lenovo support site and did not see any sleep issues wrt w530 (though some for older? 510).
Anyway, my support situation might be a bit complicated since I bought the machine through an
amazon after-market upgrade outfit: which added more memory and also had a much faster ship time
then lenovo's direct buy site. While they do request direct contact for any issues, just seems like it
might be a long turnaround if I take that path. I do like the w530 --- except for sleep.
Though --- maybe the LPM removal might magically help.

[kpfalzer]

Just a follow-up. Having removed the Lenovo Power Manager (LPM), my w530 seems to be working better; now just using the Windows 7 power manager.
I have used for a few days now, in various power modes, with sleep, plugged in and not.
So, perhaps that (rm-ing LPM) did the trick.

[ctinca]

Hello,

I am experiencing the exact same pb with the sleep function on a brand new W530. Funny, when I received the unit, the sleep function seemed to work fine before the 1000s of windows and hardware updates.

Do I understand correctly that the pb can be avoided by REMOVING the Lenovo Power Manager (I have version 6.55 installed)??? If the sleep function works w/o this software, then I guess there isn't a hardware issue...

As well, would you be able to enable the Intel Turbo Boost Technology from the Windows 7 power manager?

[kpfalzer]

I have not had any problems w/ sleep now after I removed LPM last week.
Not sure about the turbo-boost --- but you can checkout all the windows 7 power modes before you uninstall LPM.
LPM can always be re-installed.