I have numerous problems that arise whenever I use battery power on my SL500 with XP operating system and now also in Windows 7 after the recent upgrade. If the system goes into sleep mode either through deliberate action or by leaving inactive for 15 minutes thren after restarting the following always happens:

1.  Volume buttons stop working

2.  Lenovo toolbox button stops

3.  Some of the Fn buttons stop (I have not gone through all these to exhaustively check everyone)

4.  When rebooting to fix this I always get a BIOS error (8603 - checksum bad) and have to restart again which causes the BIOS to revert to the default settings and everything is OK.

The problem does not happen when powered by the AC adaptor. 

My laptop is the 2746-N8G model.  Is this a hardware problem or driver issue?

Other posts touch on some of these problems but I have not seen anyone with all the above symptoms.

Thanks for any help you can give,

this also happens to me on windows 7 32 bit. As for the checksum error...i also get that probably once a week. Not all the time.

Hi SL500_user,

For number 4, proceeding guide suggest:-

Message:- 8603: CMOS Checksum Bad

Solution:- CMOS contents failed the Checksum check. Indicates that the CMOS data has been changed by a program other than the BIOS or that the CMOS is not retaining its data due to malfunction. This error can typically be resolved by using AMIBIOS Setup.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-70032

As for other problems, if they happen in two OS's then it's safe to conceive that they are due to some fault in the hardware.

Hope it helps. 

Hi Maliha,

Thanks for the suggestions.  If others are having this problem, as the previous post suggests, it sounds like there might be a generic problem with the SL500 system board when operated from battery power.  I would be interested to know if anyone has a 2746-N8G or similar model which does not show the behaviour described in my earlier post.

Obviously by using the AC power I can avoid these problems but I am not always able to do this.  I would like to confirm that I have a faulty unit and that there is a fix before returning the laptop for a repair under warranty.

I have the same problems in Vista Business 32 SP2. My model is 2746-E7G

Same problem here, model number is 2746-AC6. The CMOS checksum error does not always appear after the buttons stop working, however.

Hi,  i just got a 8603 this morning for the first time.

I would like to add that although i do have the problem with the laptop not entering standby when the lid is closed, i never got a 8603 untill now. I also have the problem that the volume buttons are not responding. The standby problem and the volume button problem always occur at the same time.

But yesterday i used my computer on battery. I put it into standby , then started it up again, then standby again untill at some point it did not enter standby mode. I tried the volume buttons and nothing happened. Then i noticed that the hard disk led stopped blinking while i was holding down one of the volume buttons (my hd-led blinks every second even though there is no hd activity).

I also checked with the dpc latency check utility. When I pressed one of the buttons the whole system hangs (even the hd-led does not blink) and the DPC utility shows this too.

I am not entirely sure but i think this happend only for the volume-up button and the lenovo care button. At the time this happened my volume was already down to zero and muted. But once again, i am not sure.

But the really strange thing is, i've never had a 8603 untill now. So yesterday did some experimenting with the not working volume buttons. More specifically:

* i was working on battery

* i had entered and left standby mode several times untill i got the standby problem

* the volume buttons were not working

 * i held them down for a very long time ( ~ 30 seconds)  to see what would happen.

I got tired, shut down the machine. The nex morning i boot up and get a 8603

I never did this before, so maybe the 8603 is related to holding the buttons for a very long time while they are not responding?

I have a SL500. Even though i got a 8603 error, every things seems to be working fine now.

Hope this helps.

edit: i have not been able to reproduce this problem. I don't know what triggers the standby and volume button issues.

Hi All,

I have been seeing this issue in SL300 but am not sure if it happened when using battery. I need to analyze a bit.

Are you able to tell what upgrade have you done prior to this issue?

How about the buttons such as volume buttons next to the Blue button (Lenovo Care button)?

Please kindly share your machine type model and OS type for escalation purporse if there it's needed.

Thanks!

Regards,

Cleo

I Have a ThinkPad SL500 2746-AFG

I have not upgraded the BIOS, it is still at 1.14

My windows version is Vista, fully patched.

I am lagging somewhat on the updates in the Thinkvantage System Update tool. However, i do update every now and then, and this problem has existed since i got my SL500.

If i remember correctly, when this problem happens the Fn+function keys will not work either but i am not sure. Sadly i can not reproduce it at this time.  My problem is very similar to what the threadstarter described, except it does not happen each time it goes into standby. So it is a bit of a dead end. If i can find a way to reproduce it i'll post it here. For me it is not a big problem because it does not happen often.

Hi Cleo,

Thanks for looking into this.  I originally had these problems on my SL500 (2746-N8G when running with XP Pro.  I upgraded to Win 7 Pro, having changed to latest BIOS (BIOS Version/Date LENOVO 6AET59WW, 26/08/2009) and initially I still had the problems indicated in my first post.

Recently the problem has gone away and with battery power I have been able to go into sleep mode by shutting the lid and restart with full function of the Lenovo  volume control buttons and blue tool button (apart from the fact that it is not lit up).  I have also left it idle until it goes into sleep mode and restarted from this without problem.

I will continue to monitor the situation,  maybe one of the recent updates via the Lenovo System Update has helped.  Also I use AVIRA anti-virus and this may have been updated as well.

Thanks,

Phil