W700 goes dead upon power down or reboot.

[AMATX]

Hi all - I have a W700, running Win7, that I purchased from Lenovo in February. I use it as a desktop replacement, so it stays on my desk 24/7. Reboot it every few weeks, or as necessary. Runs great, no problems...until...

Week or so ago, I power it down and it won't come up. No lights, etc. Ended up pulling, then reinserting the battery, at which point it came back to life and would boot/run normally. Since then, I've rebooted two or three times, and I've either had to do the battery thing again, or unplug the power cord and plug it back in, at which time the lights would show and I could boot up again.

Anyone run into this or have ideas? Only thing I've thought of might be a crapping out battery, but it seems to be holding a charge just fine, and it worked ok when I ran the laptop off of the battery only for a few minutes(as a test). Will look into replacing the battery sometime next week, but was wondering if anyone's encountered this sort of thing before.

[QFoam]

AMATX, it's probably time for a call to Lenovo service, and I wouldn't be surprised if your power brick (power supply) is the culprit. The key symptom to me is that the machine operates properly when you unplug the power supply and then plug it back in. That sounds like a supply that's marginal or failing, to me anyway. In any case, make sure that your power brick has at least a couple of inches of free space above and around all sides, so that it doesn't overheat. It's also possible that you have a bad power cord, and the act of just moving the laptop around or unplugging/plugging it in is enough to jostle the cord back to operating again. In any case, as a precaution, with the laptop plugged in and open, but turned off for at least a half-hour, run your hands over the entire surface (except screen) and bottom of the laptop, just to make sure that no abnormal heating is occurring (although I've never heard of a W700 overheating while turned off).

If you bought the W700 new (versus a refurbished unit) in February, then I doubt that your battery is wearing out. But you can check. Right-click on the green battery icon near the lower-right corner of your screen, and select "Launch Power Manager." Once in the Power Manager, click on the Battery tab. You should then see a description of what percentage of full charge the battery can still hold. I don't know what exact percentage is considered "worn out," but your percentage should still be fairly high, probably above 70%. Plus the machine can certainly run on AC power alone (it just won't run at full speed).

Good luck!

[Harryc]

What wattage is the AC adapter and is this machine docked?

[AMATX]

Thanks for the tips, will check it out over the weekend(need laptop till then). What I've done lately(seems to work) is turn off the power supply/ac adapter while rebooting, then after the reboot has started, turn the ac adapter back on(I have it plugged into a power strip that I can turn on/off easily).

When I have some dedicated time this weekend to fool w/this, I'll verify the problem again, then swap out ac adapter power supplies and see if that fixes it. I have some extra power bricks(and maybe extra battery or two; will have to check), so I can swap power parts to hopefully isolate the cause.

Interesting that while running on battery only, it'll reboot just fine.

Battery's been holding a charge just fine, so kinda doubt that's it, but won't know for sure until I track down the cause.

Laptop's -not- been running warm or hot, so nothing there to investigate.

[richk]

Look in the event log and see if anything is failing at power-off

[AMATX]

Look in the event log and see if anything is failing at power-off

Not familiar w/event log, can you point me to where it's located??

[richk]

It is in the control panel under administrative tools.

[AMATX]

Hey, mucho thanks Will check it out...