Lenovo Energy Management: Windows 8 shutting down sporadically
Tuesday, June 17. 2014
Lenovo, like all PC manufacturers, have a short life span for their hardware. I'm running a Thinkpad L512 for my Windows 8.1 purposes. No matter what people think about Windows 8, me as a professional must know what it does and how it behaves. Eventually there will be a Windows 9 and it will be based on 8. Ok, enough rant, let's get on with it.
So, the story is that there is a perfectly good Windows 7 laptop. Supported by manufacturer and all. But if you want to go the other path, they simply throw you the classic "not supported" -phrase. At the same time the thing is, that they publish drivers and software for Windows 8, but they simply don't put your model to the list of "supported" ones. All this while your perfectly good hardware "not supported" has the same components then the next one, which is "supported".
My Thinkpad decided to just shut itself down randomly. I installed Open Hardware Monitor and Real Temp to see what's exactly going on in my machine. With these software I tried to find a rule or threshold to trigger the shutdown cycle, but couldn't. It didn't require too complex thought process to realize, that there was no proper power management software installed.
Googling the issue found me a discussion forum topic "Lenovo U410 shuts down randomly". There Mr. NINE posted a link to Lenovo Energy Management for Microsoft Windows 8. The list of supported Systems for Windows 8 is:
- Lenovo G480 (2688, 20156), G580 (2689, 20157)
- Lenovo G485, G585
- IdeaPad N580, N581, N585, N586
- IdeaPad P580, P585
- IdeaPad S206, S300, S400, S400 Touch, S400u, S405
- IdeaPad U310, U310 Touch, U410, U410 Touch
- IdeaPad Y480, Y580
- IdeaPad Z380, Z480, Z485, Z580, Z585
There aren't any Thinkpads in the list. But if you download the em8.0.2.3.exe, it will work! In my case the sporadic shutdowns were gone too!
