This article documents how i fixed the sleep issues on my Lenovo 460 by updating the BIOS and downloading the latest graphics drivers from Nvidia.
So I sold my Macbook in January as I’m waiting for the latest MacBook Air to be released. I have a desktop, an i7 Mac Mini but my laptop is now a Lenovo 460 i5 bugger with a nice little 320m 512Mb graphic card. Ever since I started messing around with Windows 7 I’ve been very impressed with it and it’s a HUGE step up from XP. So Windows 7 is now on a par with OSX Lion but if your have an issue with a windows machine it’s a lot harder to fix that a Mac in my opinion.
In my case my Lenovo was going to sleep I believe but not waking up. I’d close the lid and then when I opened it again the screen was blank and it looked like the computer was awake but I couldn’t do jack shite and was forced to reboot. I must say that this was a new development and it must of happened after some Window 7 update.
In trying to debug the problem I change my power setting but it didn’t seem to help, I actually turned off hibernation thinking this was the issue but to no avail. The next item proved invaluable in tracking down the problem- an article on life hacker that listed a command that outputted an HTML page that debugged your energy settings.
You basically type powercfg -ENERGY
The utility will take a while to generate the report, sometimes more than the 60 seconds it quotes you—but when it finishes you can open up the generated file in your favorite web browser. Once you’ve examined the report, you can figure out if you need to do some tweaking or update a driver. (it will output the html file to the Users/yourusername/ directory I found)
In my case I got some cryptic message about my bios, yes christ BIOS being out of date ! Not messed around with the BIOS in donkeys years. So I went to the Lenovo support site and download the latest 64 bit bios for my little laptop and updated it. Make sure you get the 64 bit version as the 32 bit didn’t’ work. On reboot I noticed that I’d lost my graphic driver for the 320m graphics card, jesus, what a mess so I went to Nvidia and got the latest graphics driver from them NOT from Lenovo.
I can now report that it all seems to work. Yes, yes we all know about the Mac Tax and how every Mac owner is a commie bastard but if this were a Mac I’d of strolled down to my nearest Mac Store and got them to fix it. Actually Macs do have an advantage in that they are build by the same folks who build the OS so this driver bios issue would of never happened. But it just shows you that there is a cost in buying a PC that sometimes is not seen in the lower price tag. Sure, you may be lucky and not have any problems but if I were a regular PC user I’d of been on the phone for hours I’m sure to someone in a far off land. Lenovo actually said on there website that my BIOS was too old and I’d need to send the machine in to them to upgrade!
So in closing I hope I’ve helped out some of my Windows 7 friends. The little boxes we type into and stare at for 12 hours each day are just tools, choose the one that works best for you, you budget and I must say apart from this issue and the almost unusable trackpad on the Lenovo 460 it’s quite a speedily little machine. If I were going to go over to the dark side 🙂 I think I ditch it because of the horrible trackpad but I hear the 470 has a better trackpad and for the price, I think the 460 was $500 on sale it can’t be beat.