I recently took receipt of an all-singing all-dancing Lenovo W520. A beast of a workstation/laptop with unbelievable battery power (especially when you include the additional battery slice). Keith Combs’ review is great if you want more info.
All was going really well, slowly building a nice portable dev rig.
However, yesterday evening (Sunday.. serves me right..) it wouldn’t turn on.
I knew the batteries had power, and besides the AC adaptor was plugged in.
No amount of secret keystrokes could do anything at all; very sad.
I phoned Lenovo USA as they have a 24/7 hotline (although not for UK consumers I was told..) however the kind support person asked me to follow theses steps:
- Remove the battery (and slice) and AC power
- Turn the laptop on 30 times (well try to anyway, no power obviously)
- Re-connect the batteries/AC
- Turn on
To my amazement, this worked. I couldn’t believe it as I had spent 45 minutes panicking…
Apparently it is due to residue static electricity in “a” capacitor which needed to be discharged. It can happen to brand new or years old models. Despite have several years of electronic engineering under my belt, I have no idea whether this could be true, or whether I should be worried at all… thank goodness my new laptop appears to be ok, but it’s not a good sign….
Hope it helps somebody, initial searches I did from my phone came up with nothing, so if you have a bricked Lenovo W520 try the above steps!
Leave a Reply