I have a Thinkpad 470s which works great and would serve my sister very well for going to school, but it has one annoying issue – if it goes to sleep or hibernates, it will not wake up. Once it hits that state, I cannot find anything that can wake up the laptop. In order to get it working again, I have to hold the power button until the machine restarts.
I’ve run diagnostics and can’t find anything problematic in the laptop. In trying to find the latest drivers, I found that the BIOS driver is out of date compared to Lenovo’s website. This corresponds to the information I’ve found in other threads about similar issues – the BIOS needs to be fixed or updated.
The problem I’m running into is that when I try to run the BIOS update, the laptop either goes to sleep or hibernates as one of the first steps. Then it gets stuck there and cannot wake up to move forward. When I hold the power button to power cycle it, the laptop simply logs back into Windows, with no awareness that a BIOS update was started.
I tried reinstalling Windows but that didn’t change anything. I also tried making the update into a bootable USB – this resulted in a screen saying something along the lines of “The BIOS update will continue next time the laptop restarts…” and then the laptop goes to sleep indefinitely. Again, when I restart the laptop by holding the power button, there’s no indication that a BIOS update has been started.
What can I do to update the BIOS correctly? The only guide I found which I haven’t tried is a reddit guide on flashing a customized BIOS which requires specialized hardware (CH341A Programmer) in order to install an update that is modified compared to the Lenovo issued one. I have no interest in that – I simply want to install the latest Lenovo provided BIOS update.
Is there any way to get an updated BIOS on this laptop without a specialty hardware programmer? Or is my best bet to take it into a shop to get this corrected?
(Not sure if relevant: this started after I left the laptop nearly fully discharged for 2 weeks. Clearly it wasn’t fully discharged because the battery still works pretty well.)
