Fixing the performance of my Lenovo W520 on battery power

Ever since I got my Lenovo W520 it has had terrible performance while on battery power. I had tried changing all of the preferences within the Power Manager to maximize performance when on battery but nothing seemed to make a difference.

Overall, the computer performance changed dramatically when unplugging the AC connection.

After a bit of searching online last week, I found that an update to the BIOS would fix this issue, and I can confirm that it indeed did fix the performance issues that I was experiencing.

If you are running a Lenovo W520, you should update your system BIOS to version 1.32 using the following files. From Lenovo’s support forum, “Please apply BIOS 1.32. This fixes TurboBoost when cold booting on battery. You must keep the battery in the system when on AC if you want to use TurboBoost as well.“:

• Readme: http://download.lenovo.com/…/8buj10us.txt
• Windows EXE: http://download.lenovo.com/…/8buj10us.exe
• Bootable ISO: http://download.lenovo.com/…/8buj10uc.iso

Hope that helps.