I have now owned a w520 for almost a year and have very mixed feelings about this product and Lenovo support, and drivers also.
First of all it has been very hard to get and wait for drivers that would make this product work as supposed to. I am a photographer and use Adobe products and therefore I need drivers for the display adapter that works with CS6 which I upgraded to a month ago. After upgrading tp CS6 photoshop eiter crashed or turned of GPU functions and Adobe wanted me to updtage the Display drivers which i did with the Lenovo Update and Drives tool. That did not help, in fact i became worse. After strugling with this for some days i finaly got working drivers from the Nvicidia website for the Quadro 2000M adapter. So why, Lenovo, are the drivers you supply, older than the ones Nvidia has and not working?
Another insanely annoying thing with the w520 is the Audio system which distorts audio when connected to LAN (not WIFI) which I am most of the time to my gigabit LAN servers (WIFI speed inadequit). To start of with i thought it was due to drivers, but after reading hundreds of posts from other w520 owners i now know that the distortions is caused by the audio hardware beeing interfeered by the LAN card or something like it which must be a design flaw. That means that whenever i edit video, which I do a lot, i ahve to disconnect LAN to have undstorted audio. That's just great Lenovo, you cretated a Laptop for demanding visual and audio creatives but made life with the w520 a big challenge.
In the end of june 2010122 I had a error mesaage from the Lenovo Solutions software, saying that there was a hardware error. In the message it says i ave to contact Lenovo at support.lenovo.com and then there is an error code to pass to the support personel.
Finding aout who to contact at Lenovo is like entering a jungle for the first time, nothing is clear and it seems that Lenovo almost wanted the hide the contact info which is burried in dozens of links to other unhelpfull info. Today, I wanted to get this done and finaly found the tlephone number to the danish support. I gave the support guy (actually IBM support) the error codes, but was told he did not know what to do with them. I almost couldn't beleive this, but after some talk it turned out that the guy that specifficaly handles Thinkpad support, almost knows nothing about the product and taht he has never heard of the problems the w520 has given so many users. The only thing he could do was to email me a link to install the same peace of software that turned up with the useless error codes. In my eyes this makes Lenovo support completely useless.
The synaptics pointing device on the W520 also works differently form all other laptops I've have owned which is a pain when working with Adobe products, if you are used to beeing able to press the spacebar and get the hand cursor to scroll contents. I have not been able to find any setting to makes this work normally. Only sollution to this is to use the red clicktoris in stead of the trackpad which took some time getting used to.
In a lot of peoples minds Lenovo stands for rock solid Quality and service. But after owning this W520 this asumption has turned out to be one big disapointment. The display is fantastic (after calibrating wit Spyder 3, not the built in thing) , the system is fast (when drivers are working) and also the battery life is very good, but that said, these are the only good things about this laptop in my opinion.
Thanks, Steen
