Lenovo W520 Owner's Thread

[wtlloyd]

I love my W520. I use it for photo editing (CS5, Lightroom) and CAD. It's my sole machine at this time, I rely heavily on it.

Not a single issue, I really think the few complaints come from people who won't leave good enough alone, they are installing non-Lenovo drivers and tweaks to get more performance. Or, they have esoteric needs that any stock system would hiccup at.

Granted, I don't push the envelope with my uses. But if you are content to run a stock machine (sure, I added RAM and will switch over to mSATA boot in a few months, that's pedestrian stuff compared to some users) w/ Lenovo drivers, you shouldn't get into trouble.

[Thors.Hammer]

I love my W520. I use it for photo editing (CS5, Lightroom) and CAD. It's my sole machine at this time, I rely heavily on it.

Not a single issue, I really think the few complaints come from people who won't leave good enough alone, they are installing non-Lenovo drivers and tweaks to get more performance. Or, they have esoteric needs that any stock system would hiccup at.

Granted, I don't push the envelope with my uses. But if you are content to run a stock machine (sure, I added RAM and will switch over to mSATA boot in a few months, that's pedestrian stuff compared to some users) w/ Lenovo drivers, you shouldn't get into trouble.

That may be true for some people but it certainly wasn't for me. My original W520 used nothing but the certified drivers from support.lenovo.com. My software mix wasn't unusual either.

[badhabit_wb]

I've had great luck with my w520 as well and i've played around with a lot of things. Hardware has been rock solid and drivers have worked fine as well. any problems i've had I caused.

[huberth]

I love my Lenovo W520.

Best laptop I have ever owned - and I am running some very demanding apps on the system.

Great performance - excellent screen - very good battery life - not too heavy

(Because of this, I forgive Lenovo for not fixing the slow warm boot issue - I just do hard re-boots.)

As far as I can see, there is nothing that beats the W520 in price/performance. My suggestion is to go ahead and order the W520 and give it a good workout during the first 30 days. (I usually run the diagnostic test in stress mode for the first day after I unpack it.) If you get a bad unit, return or exchange it.

[Mech0z]

Think the Ivy Bridge W520 will have thunderbolt port? Havent found out if its standard on Ivy Bridge

[Hearst]

While the USB 3.0 chipsets will be integrated on all Ivy Bridge systems as standard, Thunderbolt in comparison will be on selected systems. It's up to the manufacturer whether to implement it the ports on their systems or not.

[Usul99]

Our department is switching to a 3d drawing program - from AutoCAD to Revit - and because we are a Lenovo shop, the best machine we can get appears to be W520 with the 2000M graphics card. We've been told by consultants that we'd be better off with a gaming type card but doubt we can obtain one installed by our supplier. Is it possible for a non-techie to install another card in a W520 and if so, are there known physical size requirements? Any thoughts on what card to get for this particular application?

Go for a Quadro card.

Check this PDF from Nvidia. Its information about the differences between the Geforce and Quadro cards.

www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html

Enjoy

[rtpnc6]

I love my W520. I use it for photo editing (CS5, Lightroom) and CAD. It's my sole machine at this time, I rely heavily on it.

Not a single issue, I really think the few complaints come from people who won't leave good enough alone, they are installing non-Lenovo drivers and tweaks to get more performance. Or, they have esoteric needs that any stock system would hiccup at.

Granted, I don't push the envelope with my uses. But if you are content to run a stock machine (sure, I added RAM and will switch over to mSATA boot in a few months, that's pedestrian stuff compared to some users) w/ Lenovo drivers, you shouldn't get into trouble.

The random power shutdowns are occuring with unmodified systems. I personally know that a unit, which was experiencing frequent shutdowns, was sent into the lab for analysis with the only the factory preload. There are a significant number of W520 users who have blown away the factory image in the vain attempt to stabilize their systems. Usually the only fix is to replace the motherboard (in fact there was a shortage several months ago due to the number of boards being replaced). My personal system is running fine since June, 2011, but that hasn't been true for some of the users. It's not an imaginary problem and, most important, there's currently no resolution after 8 months of the issue being raised. Installing the latest BIOS level (1.34), power management driver and utility, etc has not affected the problem.

[ddong]

So what about Skyrim with the last beta drivers?

[lonleyppl]

After doing a full reinstall of Windows and getting all the tweaks from Lenovo (I think) I've noticed my batter life is 3/4 to 1/2 of what it was. Does anyone have ideas for things I missed or didn't get?

I didn't use the Lenovo partition to reinstall, but I think I recovered all my settings to where they were previously.