My sister got a Thinkpad G500 from Lenovo pretty much at the same time I purchased my Ideapad Yoga 13 from the same brand. My Ideapad, while suffering from battery life and wi-fi issues and being stuck with a too small SSD, still performs reasonably. It still boots fast and doesn’t exhibit hardware issues. The upgrade to Windows 10 seems to be the change that made it worse, but it still works… compared to the G500 of my sister. That machine was painfully slow and, I discovered, suffered from various hardware issues I didn’t know about.
Assuming the only issue was slowness, I proposed my sister to replace the hard drive of the laptop with a SSD. Before doing so, however, I checked in the user’s manual of the laptop how to replace the drive. It was possible to do it by removing the back cover of the machine and unscrewing the drive, no need to disassemble the keyboard, remove the memory, the display, etc., like on my Ideapad or even worse, on a MacBook. If there is too high risk of breaking something while dissassembling the laptop to reach the hard drive, it is better to leave that machine alone and invest in a new one later on. This is what I chose to do for my Ideapad, because of brittle keyboard clips that could completely break, preventing the keyboard to hold on afterwards. I also needed to make sure a 2.5″ SATA SSD would fit, because maybe I could need a M2 instead. If something intermediate is needed, like a mSATA, upgrading is less worth it. A SATA or M2 SSD can at least be reused in another system if the target laptop fails later on.
The SSD doesn’t fit! WHY?
I started to work on the laptop January 5, 2018. I first removed the battery, unscrewed the back cover and located the hard drive. It was attached to the system using a bracket screwed into the chassis. I removed the screw and was able to disconnect and pull off the drive. I then needed to unscrew the bracket from the hard drive and screw it to the SSD instead. That part didn’t work well. No matter how hard I was trying, I wasn’t able to fit the screws. I thought the laptop had a 1.5″ hard drive instead of a 2.5″, but no, it ended up working. The SSD had something written on both sides so I was trying to install the bracket on the wrong side. After I was able to screw the bracket, I connected the SSD to the laptop.
After I installed the SSD, I put back the cover and the battery. Then I turned on the laptop and booted using a USB key containing Ubuntu Live. I used that to run a SMART check on the SSD, making sure it wasn’t flawed right from the start. This is more likely to happen with an hard drive, but it CAN happen with a SSD as well. Doing a self-test before installing anything can thus save a lot of time.
Stuck at Lenovo logo, requiring RMA
After that check, I inserted my USB-based Windows 10 installation medium. I got this medium from Microsoft, it can now be downloaded freely as opposed to previously, requiring the purchase of a CD or DVD. Getting the medium is now easy, the challenge is to get the activation working now.
But before tackling the activation issues, I had to make this laptop boot the USB medium. Instead of booting, the laptop just froze at the Lenovo logo. The only thing I could do is hit ctrl-alt-delete, get a blank screen, and the logo back again. I tried to power off the laptop, power it back on, to no avail.
I searched on Google and found other occurrences of this issue. Several people are experiencing that problem, with no other solution than contacting Lenovo’s technical support and get the laptop replaced… when it is under warranty. It seems more and more that when warranty is over, a laptop is now a piece of crap that is just good to be thrown away, which annoyed me quite a lot. Fortunately, after a couple of attempts, removing the battery, putting it back in, rebooting again, again and again, I got past the frozen Lenovo logo. After that hurdle, I was able to install Windows 10.
Windows 10 asked me to connect to a Microsoft account. I used mine in order to perform the installation, but I knew I would need to do something to hook up my sister’s account, so she could login without me having to give her my main password.
Activation working without efforts? Strange…
After I finished installing Windows 10, I noticed from the system properties it was activated. Cool. However, I found that without even asking me, the system used the same product key as my own Lenovo Idepad Yoga 13 ultrabook. I was worried that the Microsoft’s tool creating the USB medium customized the installation USB key with my product key, so I was attempting to activate Windows on multiple computers with the same key. Maybe at some point, Microsoft will detect that and deactivate one of the two copies, either mine or the one of my sister, after she got her laptop back.
After significant amount of wasted time searching on Google, I figured out that this situation happened to others. It seems that the product key is used by several laptops of a given brand. Either the key is hard-wired somewhere in a read-only store of the machine, maybe the trusted platform module, or there is a registry at Microsoft of OEM machine ids mapped to product keys. Anyhow, my sister got a fully activated Windows 10 without any effort from me.
I was worried I would need to have her purchase a new license key or reactivate her current license via phone. Or maybe even worse, the current license would work for Windows 8, not Windows 10, and my sister would prefer to get back Windows 8. All my concerns went away with this effortless activation, but keep in mind things will not always be as smooth.
Looping Windows Update
That one caused me a lot of wasted time. There was a bug with one of the updates that failed to install. However, the update was partially installed. The failure caused Windows to retry installing the update each and every time the computer was shut down or rebooted. This pretty much wiped out the benefits of having a SSD because of increased shut down, reboot and even boot time, since at boot, Windows was finalizing the installation of the faulty update and failing!
I searched a long time for that one, tried to manually install the update to no avail. Some forum posts were referring to that problem without a known solution. Sometimes, it worked at some point after a lot of attempts. Other times, it required reinstallation. I even read a post from a user who called Microsft, got a new ISO image of Windows 10, installed that and the update worked! But then, why is there a medium creation tool if we need to get an ISO from elsewhere? Will everybody reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch need to call Microsoft to get that alternate ISO? Really? That is a serious bummer in my opinion. I thought about asking a link to that ISO, but that would have given me the English version while my sister wanted the French one.
At some point, I got so pissed off that I started searching a way to disable the automatic updates. This is possible by changing group policies… on the Pro version of Windows 10. My sister had the Home version. But the problem didn’t happen on my systems, probably because I started from Windows 8, then got 8.1, then 10. Maybe I’d need to go that same route on that Thinkpad?
Fortunately, there is a tool from Microsoft called Show or hide updates. I installed that tool, and told it to hide the offending update. That fixed the issue without having to tentatively reinstall, call Microsoft or try to install Windows 8, then upgrade to 8.1, then upgrade to 10!
Short-term laptop to be replaced after warranty?
What happened after the installation of Windows 10 pretty much lead me to believe what the section’s title states. I was really shocked and annoyed and questioning my trust against Lenovo. A PC is not like a simple appliance you just plug in and start. It has settings, it has applications installed, there is sometimes even a physical configuration to get used to. I cannot afford having to fully replace that configuration every year or two! That’s a serious non-sense, and not counting the very bad ecological impact of such a short-sighted offering. I know, it was not my laptop, but my next laptop could very well suffer from these more and more common flaws.
The freezing at Lenovo logo was just the tip of the iceberg! I then discovered that only Windows 8 drivers were offered for that Thinkpad G500 on the Lenovo website, no Windows 10 drivers at all. However, the preinstalled drivers coming with Windows 10 allowed the machine to pretty much work. Later on, I also found out that the DVD drive was also broken, not detected at all by Windows. Moreover, the Webcam was broken, showing a black screen.
Wi-fi started to go bad, the mouse pointer started to move erratically, the machine just became totally unusable. I had to plug in that laptop to an external keyboard, mouse and even an Ethernet cable.
Again, for the DVD drive and Webcam, the only solution was to contact Lenovo and get replacements, IF the laptop was still under warranty. At this point, I was stuck. Without another idea, I would have had to give up and tell my system the best solution is to throw that laptop away.
Pulling some things off
I noticed a black tape at the place of the Webcam. Maybe that tape is not supposed to be there and can be removed. I removed it and started the Camera application again: I got an image, yeah!
I then found out that some people were having issues with both the DVD drive and the freezing at boot. Could these two be related? If the DVD drive is flaky, it can slow down or even prevent boot as the BIOS/UEFI will try to query it in order to figure out if a disk is inserted.
The solution was quick and simple: just remove the optical drive from the machine, yes, really, pull it off. After I did that, the laptop booted flawlessly. I tested it several times, also tried to reboot, without any freezing issue. It also seemed, although I didn’t benchmark it formally, that the boot was faster. There would be a hole in the laptop casing instead of the DVD drive, because I didn’t have any other drive or something dummy to go into the bay. But at least, it would work.
Transferring ownership without my password
A small but significant step remained: how to allow my sister to log in to her « new » laptop without giving her my personal password in order for her to create her Microsoft account, or me getting her password to connect to her account? There are two ways to solve this cleanly, and I implemented both to be sure.
- Create a new account based on a known email address linked to a Microsoft account. I knew my sister’s email address and was sure she used that to create her Microsoft account, so I just had to create the account with that address; no need to enter the password until logging in. There are two pitfalls though. Firstly, the person needs to be connected to Internet for the first login, and not sure wi-fi will work, maybe just wired Ethernet since you need to be logged in to set up wi-fi! Secondly, the created account is not Administrator by default; I had to fix that so my sister would be able to install new programs on her machine.
- It is still possible to create a local account, so I did it and set a dummy password my sister can change after, or remove the local account altogether. Again, I needed to make sure the local account was in the Administrators group; by default it is not!
My sister was amazed at the speed increase we achieved by replacing the hard drive with a SSD. She thought that laptop was good for the thrash can before I fixed it. Even funnier, later on her boyfriend got an HP 15-bw028ca that although more recent, happened to be slower than that old fixed Thinkpad!
Eventually that HP piece of junk will benefit from a similar treatment. Maybe that will deserve another post.