Lenovo Thinkpad X220 Users Seeing Sudden Unexplained Drop In Performance

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It’s been a strange day for random equipment failures, folks–first we came out with word about Skype for Mac, and now we’re seeing some reports that Lenovo ThinkPad X220 users are seeing some particularly unpleasant issues with their hardware, and without an easy explanation as to why.

What’s going on here? Well, the reports are largely the same, though the total number of Lenovo ThinkPad X220s actually having a problem is still somewhat in question. But what the reports are suggesting is a lot of machines whose processors are suddenly dropping down to 800 MHz, despite the fact that they’re not only plugged into wall sockets, but also set to maximum-level performance profiles and aren’t actively overheating. And this in turn is causing some lowered read and write speeds, as well as reduced performance on hard drives and solid state drives alike, among other things.

And the solution is unpalatable in its own right–most of those same reports say that the only reliable way to fix the problem is a complete shutdown and cold boot. Some, however, have reported success by disabling Intel Speedstep or CPU Power Management, but this isn’t the case for everybody.

At last report, Lenovo was aware of the problem, but there was yet no word on any more permanent fix to the problem than occasionally rebooting your hardware. Admittedly, this doesn’t seem to be much more than an inconvenience, having to reboot your system every so often, but it’s definitely not an inconvenience I’d want to have, and this may well be nothing more than a symptom of some larger problem whose full extent we don’t yet know.

If you’ve got a Lenovo ThinkPad X220, folks, we’d especially love to hear from you to see if you’re having these problems. And if you don’t have one of these but would still like to talk laptop, well, you’re just as welcome in the comments section down below.