Lenovo U350 Major Quality Issue!

So my friend just got the Lenovo U350. It is the new line from Lenovo that uses the ulv processor and weighs only 3.5lbs. He came to me because the fan on his machine was constantly on and one side of the laptop would get super hot. The battery life was also around 4 hours as opposed to the 5 hours advertised. Since it was using a low voltage cpu, this seemed odd to me. I decided to open her up. As I was opening screw after screw, I kept coming across these little oval "lenovo" stickers which I imagine were put in place for warranty issues. I gently peeled them off and put them aside so that I can return them when I was done. My plan was to get to the heat sink and remove whatever heat pad they had put on it and replace it with some silver grease.


After countless screws and parts, I got to the heat sink, a single skinny heat pipe that ran across the the gpu and cpu to the fan. To my amazement, when I pulled off the heat sink, I found another "lenovo" warranty sticker. IT WAS ON THE CPU IN BETWEEN IT AND THE HEAT SINK! What the hell! Attached are some poor quality images I took with my cellphone of it. I was not ready with a good camera, so I apologize for how crappy the images are.

Well, I scrapped off the sticker with a razor. Removed the heat pads from both the cpu and gpu. Put the grease on and put everything back together. After powering it on, the fan did not kick in until vista was fully loaded. After adjusting the start up programs and turning off aero, the laptop is now constantly cool. The fan rarely turns on AND the battery last 7-8 hours on idle with the wireless on! I just watched the planet earth blu-ray set using an external player on it. No stuttering.

Just wanted to share my experience. This is a great laptop if lenovo didn't go out of their way to cripple it. I hope I didn't void the warranty


Pictures of U350:
http://i27.tinypic.com/33kpugn.jpg
http://i30.tinypic.com/vo0gtt.jpg
http://i30.tinypic.com/rk8px5.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/155mnhh.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/11i25x2.jpg

I'm glad to help.

1. After some more time with the laptop, I can say that the fan still turns on most of the time but is on its lowest speed. So it is not as loud. You can hear a definite increase in sound once you start playing videos and the like. But unlike before, the fan will occasionally turn off all together.

2. Using my cooking thermometer, I can say the area left of the touchpad and near the keyboard is around 93F while the right side of the touchpad is 75F. On the under side of the laptop directly underneath the 93F reading, it is around 104F. It feels slightly warm to the touch but not "hot". I don't have an unmodded U350 to compare. These temperatures are at idle in an air conditioned (75F) room.


I should have added a warning that this is not a mod for everybody. You can easily kill your laptop. You pretty much have to remove every screw in your laptop and detach every cable. There are multiple different length and diameter screws. You then take the most sensitive part on your laptop, the cpu, and scrape it clean with a razor, rinse it with alcohol, and then put highly electrically conductive grease on top of it. A single slip and you are done.

I agree that it would be best to fix this under the warranty, but good luck convincing them that something is wrong. I don't even understand how this can be common to all the u350's but removing the sticker and adding the silver sure did fix a lot of issues for me.

(Also about the open PCI-express slot, it did not recognize my spare wireless card under Vista when I installed it in there. It acted as if nothing was installed.)

It is soldered on. I think all of the ULV's are BGA. To be honest, it is not impossible to upgrade, just difficult and costly.

This guy did it on a Sony UX: http://www.micropctalk.com/forums/sh...5354#post35355

Have you tried using TPspeedfan to set the fan speed and temps? The goal is to lower the fan noise. You'll probably end up losing battery life because of the extra load on the CPU at idle caused by the program running and the extended fan time needed at the lower fan speeds you'll be using.

There are lots of things you can do to reduce the heat produced by your laptop when it is at idle:
1. Turn off Aero or at least just the glass feature
2. Turn off the sidebar
3. Turn off all unnecessary programs at startup

Undervolting might be possible, but it was not on the SU3500 I had.

As far as dismantling the laptop, it should be somewhat obvious what you need to remove (every screw in sight). I remember having a problem with the keyboard myself. Of course, I had a different laptop, but make sure to remove the harddrive, ram, wireless card, and anything else removable. They might be hiding screws. In the end, you might have to use a little muscle to pop out anything caught on a tab.

Someone sent me a private message a little while back asking for help dismantling. He had actually broken a part off the motherboard. So be very careful.

I doubt you'll accomplish much by doing this. The best you'll do is replacing the heat pads with thermal grease. No one else has reported the sticker issue I had and your temps seem very reasonable. You may get more battery life with a more efficient cooling system, but it may not effect the fan noise.

Good luck!

Oops. That is what I meant.

You can set exactly at what temps the fan turns on and exactly at what speed to run it at. Make sure to read the documentation.

Although that grease is fine to use, I must warn you that another user reported to me that he didn't find a sticker on his cpu. He changed the thermal pads to grease and closed up his unit, but amount of benefit might not be worth the hassle. Even if you use the best grease on earth, it doesn't really help you much because the bottle neck is in the design of the heat sink (if you don't have the sticker).

Second warning: it is a pain in the butt to dismantle this laptop. So unless you think you are experienced enough, I wouldn't recommend it. You can easily ruin it.

Lastly, have you tried disabling the glass effect in windows and turning off unnecessary programs and services from start up? If you can streamline your system, it might do more for heat output than the thermal grease will. You can also try underclocking your cpu for times when you're just surfing the web, and you don't want the fan to kick on.

Nothing is wrong with the heat sink but thermal grease is only one small part of your entire cooling system. Read my article on thermal greases if you want to learn more: http://www.overclock.net/cooling-exp...ml#post7116893

The 7-8 hours is with the cpu restricted to 50%, the lcd dimmed almost all the way, and the computer just idling. So it'll just sit there wait for you for 8 hours, but not do much else.

The glass effect and aero are the Windows 7 and Vista effects. They are turned on by default: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

It really slows down your computer and requires lots of CPU power which results in excess heat being produced by your computer. If you can turn off all of the unnecessary processes that go on in the background on your computer, you can drastically increase your battery life. This is all without opening your laptop.