Yesterday, someone asked me if I had a chance to install Windows 7 on my Lenovo W500 notebook computer. Well, I said yet, three times.
It started when Windows 7 Beta came out. My Vista had gotten sufficiently slow that I decided I needed to reinstall something. Being the adventurous type, I decided to give it a go, but with a “goback” plan. My go back plan was to install al the programs on drive C in my 2nd hard drive (in the media bay), then put all my personal data on my built in hard drive. That way, I could easily switch back to vista by simply popping out the removable drive and putting in my vista boot drive.
I never actually did go back to vista, but there were times I did waste a lot of time when I probably should have. Beta was pretty frustrating. Drivers were not so good, some crashing, some hanging, but not surprising. RC was actually fatal. My computer completely stopped booting when it was not docked. Luckily RTM had just arrived so I repaved. Sadly now, with RTM, I’m starting to have the same booting problem. It gets past the first windows logo, then boots (but you’d never know it). If docked, no problem. I’m on an airplane now and my docking station is far far away.
The last thing I did was change my bios display config to “no OS detection on graphics card” and “Discrete mode” and it did boot this time. No science on this because sometimes it would just work anyhow.
Anyone has more data on this, let me know. Could be my notebook is hosed. Who knows. For now I’m up and not going to shutdown until the pry the keyboard from my laptop tray.
(I’m also not completely sure it’s not a hardware problem)