Interestingly, I also appear to be using integrated graphics rather than the Quadro that’s installed..

I stumbled across this the other day. The Lenovo uses integrated graphics until 3D work is required, at which point it switches to the NVidia card. I tried telling it to cut that crap out and use the discrete card exclusively, but it got a bit pouty at me.

I googled my exact laptop model (Lenovo W520) and it’s a really common issue, fixed by a BIOS update.

Arse. I did actually wonder idly about BIOS updates, because it sounds like the sort of symptom you might get with an older BIOS and a newer CPU that it can’t identify correctly. Figured it was highly unlikely with being a laptop though; they don’t often get CPU upgrades. Didn’t occur to me that it might be a model / batch problem.

Good work, sir. (-:

Just restarted to check out the graphics card and I discovered what you just said. It’s called nVidia Optimus apparently, and it’s fine by me if it saves battery, which it should.

Lots of controversy on Lenovo boards about it – hit most W520 owners apparently and took lots of fixes to get right. To be honest it’s worth a product recall. I bet most people haven’t figured it out and are just grumbling at Lenovo POS.

Having said that it’s that powerful, I could hardly tell until I found out that long job took less time on a colleague’s machine.

‘s good kit, generally.

The one I was referring to is actually mine; well, work-supplied, anyway. Goodness knows which model it is offhand, I’ll check.

I like this laptop. I like the fact that Lenovo do plain businesslike laptops for business as well as all the spangly swoosh stuff they have to do for the consumer market.

Probably spending too much time context switching (my experience is unix based, not to sure how Windows manages that kind of thing)

I thought task switch still took a CPU instruction so the CPU would still be working, just not on the problem you wish it to work on.

The situation was one big job running for an hour in the background whilst I was surfing etc. Nothing unusual.