Pretty much no posts over the last few months as I have been extremely busy. Been doing some large projects for the Boston Consulting Group as well as wrapping up my honours year project and papers. Expect to see a lot more activity now though!
Anyway my return to my blog is hopefully going to reach folks having trouble with their Lenovo X201 Tablet. I ordered one about a month and a half ago but with delays due to faulty processors and mother nature it took about four weeks to arrive, damn you volcanoes.
The X201 finally arrived and it was everything I was wanting and better. Photoshop on it is awesome and extremely smooth, boot time brilliant, pretty damn light and the main attraction 12 hours of battery life… if your battery works that is.
My Lenovo battery was playing hard to get. It would charge to about 34% and go no further, if you hibernated it and woke it back up it would charge some more. Battery maintenance options did nothing and Google search brought up nothing except for other cries of help. Updates for both Windows and Lenovo turned up dead ends and even the Lenovo tech team where a bit of a wall with the usual “have you tried turning it off and back on” sort of answers.
Eventually Lenovo sent me a new battery and I thought I would finally be free to run through fields for twelve hours playing minesweeper. No.
This battery charged to 88% out the box and through battery gauge resets eventually to 100%. However five days on and it is back to the 34% of doom.
So here is what I have found. The answer to fixing your X201 battery problems. The latest Lenovo BIOS update. Now the BIOS update isn’t part of the Lenovo laptop manager application so you have to Google it. Here’s the link I used:
Downloaded, ran, it updated, restarted and too much enjoyment the Lenovo x201 actually started charging.
Hope this reaches someone else having the same issues 
.
Hello Iain,
your post solved what in a couple of minutes what struggled me the whole day. My new X201 Tablet is now charging. Thank you very much!
Do you know why is that this BIOS update is not found in Lenovo’s site, although the publisher is supposed to be Lenovo itself?
Cheers,
Jorge
Hi Jorge,
Great to hear it worked. It’s an awesome Tablet once it goes properly.
In all honesty I’m not sure, I’m still quite bewildered by Lenovo tech support not suggesting/knowing about the battery bios issue, instead opting to send a replacement battery…
Maybe they keep Bios updates out of the auto updater because unlike drivers or lenovo app updates if they fail they can cause a larger blow of death to a laptop.
Hey, i have exactly the same problem, i’ll try today, and hope it will fix the battery problem.
Thx
Thank you very much for posting this. Much appreciated.