Lenovo W500 Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), machine hangs and what makes great products great
I recently got a new W500 Laptop (4062-2GX), while it’s supper fast and has a great display it is somewhat of a disappointed. As an avid ThinkPad users I can tell you – this is not an IBM laptop… it’s not built the same way my old T43 is built, and there are small things that make what used to be a great product into a good to very good product.
It started with my W500 mouse getting hanged, drove me crazy, I reinstalled the OS, drivers, searched the web only to realize there’s a known hardware malfunction – it was replaced super fast (2 days), but yet I did not expect this from an IBM laptop.
Than came the Blue Screens. After a while I decided it’s time to dig deeper and get this resolved. My Blue Screens where at iaStor.sys – to make a long story short there’s an Intel driver called AHCI driver that you can see here:
When you update your driver, or go to Windows Update it will look at Intel to see if this driver needs an update. But Surprise! while the Windows / Driver Update thinks your driver is updated there’s a new driver on Lenovo’s web site (which they are not too vocal about) Version #8.6.3 (which is newer than what I had from Intel) that you can download here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70477.html
Once I installed it BSoD are gone, at least for now…
Putting all this aside there’s a great lesson for me as a developer – it is the small but annoying things that make the difference between a very good and an excellent product.
Hope you find this helpful.
Amichay