Re: W520 shuts off intermittently, no BSOD or shut down

skippur · ‎08-26-2011

Just sent my laptop off again.Instead of testing they immediately replaced the System Board. So thumbs up for getting it back to me within 4 work days.

Will wait and see if it's fixed...

ThorsHammer · ‎04-08-2011

Look at the bright side. Nobody has reported this on the W530.

bygnth345 · ‎08-05-2012

Tomorrow I will receive my first w520 ever. It will be exciting and I'm kind of looking forward to go head to head with this SSS beast and all the other major problems this forum has educated me about.

I guess the problems will be there for me also, I think these problems must be due to a faulty design and the faults are to be expected. So it is better for me to prepare now.

Some thoughts...Lenovo recommends reforming metal fingers to increase pressure, but I can not find any detailed instructions to how this procedure should be carried out. Does anyone at Lenovo feel inclined to write a detailed instruction (I would also expect illustrations) for how it should be done? How should the bend look like, what kind of increase in pressure are we talking about?

The lack of detailed instructions for a very serious problem is a little bit...how to say this...odd?

kodiakgroup · ‎07-11-2011

bygnth345 wrote:
Tomorrow I will receive my first w520 ever. It will be exciting and I'm kind of looking forward to go head to head with this SSS beast and all the other major problems this forum has educated me about.
I guess the problems will be there for me also, I think these problems must be due to a faulty design and the faults are to be expected. So it is better for me to prepare now.

Some thoughts...Lenovo recommends reforming metal fingers to increase pressure, but I can not find any detailed instructions to how this procedure should be carried out. Does anyone at Lenovo feel inclined to write a detailed instruction (I would also expect illustrations) for how it should be done? How should the bend look like, what kind of increase in pressure are we talking about?

The lack of detailed instructions for a very serious problem is a little bit...how to say this...odd?
I wouldn't assume you will have the problem - in fact I'd say statistically you probably won't have it. We have somewhere near a dozen of them here, and only one of them exhibited this problem. If you turn out to have the problem then you may want to check back for details on how to fix it, but I wouldn't worry about it unless your machine exhibits the symptoms in this thread.

SR-71 · ‎06-13-2012

Yeah like kodiakgroup said, I wouldnt do anything until you are sure your 520 is having the problem. But if it actually is then I doubt that the metal fingers are the problem. It didnt work for me and to the best of my knowledge it hasnt worked for anyone else here. But that was no supprise really. When the RAM door on the bottom is removed you should be able to see that the little metal fingers at the edges of the door have been pressing on, and have created small indentds in the coresponding metal mesh on the chasis.

Strangly though, as long as I can aviod a full shutdown I very rarely have an SSS. But as soon as I shut down and cold boot I have an SSS within an hour or two. As such just a few days ago I was around one month without a SSS until the windows update forced a restart, even with the auto update garbage turned off..

So yeah, best of luck to you on your .. strange choice of buying Lenovo after being educated about this problem haha

ThorsHammer · ‎04-08-2011

kodiakgroup wrote:

I wouldn't assume you will have the problem - in fact I'd say statistically you probably won't have it. We have somewhere near a dozen of them here, and only one of them exhibited this problem. If you turn out to have the problem then you may want to check back for details on how to fix it, but I wouldn't worry about it unless your machine exhibits the symptoms in this thread.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't that nearly 10% of your units? Assuming Lenovo ships a million units, 10% would be statistically significant.

biznatch · ‎03-30-2011

ThorsHammer wrote:
kodiakgroup wrote:
I wouldn't assume you will have the problem - in fact I'd say statistically you probably won't have it. We have somewhere near a dozen of them here, and only one of them exhibited this problem. If you turn out to have the problem then you may want to check back for details on how to fix it, but I wouldn't worry about it unless your machine exhibits the symptoms in this thread.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't that nearly 10% of your units? Assuming Lenovo ships a million units, 10% would be statistically significant.

There are probably people out there who ordered 12 and had no problems. It it actually was 10% I think Lenovo would be paying a lot more attention.

kodiakgroup · ‎07-11-2011

Yes, on my very small sample size that's near 10 percent. Still more likely to get a normal unit than a screwed up unit at that rate, but if you look back through this thread there are IT staffers who reported many more units than I have and much safer percentages of failure.

Regardless, here's hoping that the fellow who posted gets a normal unit - they're quite nice machines when they don't have this issue.

ThorsHammer · ‎04-08-2011

I agree the actual percentage must be rather low. Thankfully. I love the W series machines. I have a rock solid W510. I will likely order a W530 as my next corporate asset, though the X1 Carbon gravitational pull is strong.

vukicevic · ‎04-24-2011

Welp. Tech came again, replaced the motherboard again... computer was then working normally, but just now (~2 days later) had the same glitchy shutoff happen. I wasn't doing anything intensive, just playing a simple low-rez game. So, not fixed; I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do. I tried bending the clips on the memory door, I guess I can try taking all the memory out of the bottom 2 slots. Beyond this, what else can I do? Pretty frustrating -- this is not a cheap laptop, and I can't really have it be unreliable especially if I'm doing live demos with it.