L520 - random sleep and constant fan

[Bardamu]

Thanks ONeill!

1. This is excellent news!

2. Won't the battery reset deplete the battery capacity by a large chunk? The laptop is brand new and I'd rather not have it acting even more like an old laptop!

3. My hard drive is doing this as well and my Power Manager settings specify for it to never spin down. It only began doing this spinning down or turning off of the drive after I changed the idle timer of the drive to 30s from 4s, though, so I'm thinking it might be related to that in some way.

Alpo, have you experienced trouble with the touchpad, like freezing mouse cursor and quick, erratic movements all over the screen? I can hardly use the laptop without an external mouse because of this.

[Alpo]

I guess battery gauge reset did not help with sleep problem. So far it went to sleep at least once after reseting. Battery capacity was 56 Wh before the reset and 59 Wh after it. In this case it didn't reduce the capacity

Power savings for the hard drive is set to never spin down, but that doesn't help. Hard drive was shutting down by itself even before changing the idle timer. Hard drive can shut down many times during for example 5 minutes. 

Touchpad works just fine on this machine. There has been a lot of problems with x220 and the touchpad. See on the bottom of this news http://digitalchumps.com/featured-electronics/132-features/7455-lenovo-x220-i7-2620m-cpugpu-throttli...  

I hope we can hear good news from Lenovo staff soon, or I'll have to return this machine.

[Alpo]

It seems that hard disk spinning down is normal behaviour for this type of WD disk. APM has been set (too) tight to save power. You can change the value with crystaldiskinfo.

Now we only need updates for fan and sleep issues. 

[Bardamu]

My L520 has now been repaired by Lenovo, or at least they tried.

They changed the mainboard and fan, but the laptop still randomly goes into sleep mode, and the fan still never turns off.

I'm contemplating sending it right back for repairs, but what can they do that they haven't done already?

[Alpo]

If they couldn't repair it, I guess only bios update can. I hope we can see that coming soon. 

[srg]

I have an L520 Win 7 Pro 64 bit which I bought about 2 weeks ago. I noticed that when I am running TPFanControl it would go to sleep every 2-5 hours, without the TPFanControl so far it works ok. 

[BadMan]

Any updates on this topic? Looking to buy a L520 i5, but i really do not want this fan error

[Bardamu]

Thanks to the notification that TPFanControl might be the cause of the random sleep mode, I found this new version of the program that is made for the W520. http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=96275

It seems to do the trick for my L520 as well though, as I have had no random sleep while using it these last few days, while I normally have plenty.

It is also a fine workaround for the fan never stopping, though I'm still hoping that Lenovo will release a bios update that shuts the fan up.

[TheGh0st]

Are there any updates concerning the Fan issue ? It's nice to hear that TPFanControl does it on the window's site, but this issue remains for Linux user and non-TPFanControl user. It would be nice to hear any official source whether this issue is known and some work is going on.

[Bardamu]

I celebrated too soon, sadly. The laptop still enters sleep mode when using the new version of TPFancontrol, just less frequently.

I wonder what bios the L520 in this review had: 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-L520-NWB53GE-Notebook.54102.0.html

It is stated that: 

"In an idle state or when surfing the web, the cooling fan switches off for longer periods of time. We measured 29.8 dB(A) in this scenario as the base noise emitted from the hard disc. "

This is nothing like my L520 at all where the fan is on all the time regardless of temperature and user activity.

Is it possible to get hold of the earliest bios versions to give those a try?