Lenovo Ideapad 310 – How To Fix It If It Crashes

Back in February, I had to buy a new laptop. My Toshiba Satellite laptop was slowing down after five years of having it. I was doing many things on it. Writing my book, trying to build my business and other personal and career building activities. It was dying a slow death, so I decided to put it out of its misery and buy a new laptop. I’ve heard MANY great things about the Lenovo laptop and ended up purchasing the Lenovo Ideapad 310 laptop.

Right away, I noticed a few things that took me a little bit to get used to. It has two fans, so one is running constantly. Not a huge deal, just wasn’t used to it. The second was the shift key on the right side of the keyboard. It’s the size of a regular key and I was used to it being the size of two keys. The other thing was the page up and down keys. You have to use a combination of keys to get that feature to work. Otherwise, it just goes up and down one line at a time. To use this feature, you use the Fn key next to the Ctrl key on the left side of the keyboard and then press the up and down arrows.

Again, those weren’t huge issues for me. Took a moment, but I got it. The laptop came with Windows 10. Had a better experience with that this time, than I did when I tried to install in on my Toshiba, let me tell you!

Fast forward two and a half months. I noticed that the laptop was getting slower. Almost to where my previous laptop was. I was getting frustrated because I was looking for a job and just couldn’t get anywhere without waiting for a few minutes. So, I decided to update my drivers. I get that little popup box coming out the right side of the screen, so I clicked it. I followed the prompts and sure enough, there was an update for my AMD drivers.

You would think that’s ok, right? It’s coming in as a Lenovo recommendation, so why wouldn’t I trust it?  Let me make this VERY clear. DO NOT TRUST IT! I’ll get into more detail in a moment, but spoiler alert, a technician from Lenovo told me that those are THIRD PARTY LINKS.

I am waiting for the drivers to update and my screen goes black, with the little spinning dots near the bottom of the screen. I figure it’s just there to restart. The black screen dims. I wait another ten minutes before I figure it’s not doing what it should be doing. So, I power it off, wait a few minutes and bring it back up. Same thing. Black screen with the spinning dots and then the screen dims. I started to worry a little. Power it off. Waited five minutes and powered it back on. SAME THING.

I am in tears at this point. I had my book on there. Over 75k of words and it was gone. I call Lenovo and started working with a technician. They gave me all the steps. Power it off. Unplug it and use a paperclip, or something equally as small and insert it into the small hole on the side to reset the laptop and bring up the BIOS screen. We went through all the steps they knew and NOTHING WORKED.

So I ask them what they plan on doing because it was THEIR link that I clicked. They said that I can send it back to them and they will either fix it or send me a new one. Ok, cool. What about what is on my laptop now. Will they be able to retrieve the files, pictures and my book?  No. I’ll have to take it somewhere to have them do it. Okkkaaaayyyyy. So, how will they reimburse me for this? “That’s not part of your warranty. You clicked a third party link…” Ummm. Wait… What??? I clicked on a link that LENOVO threw up on my screen in that little box that pops up. “Oh, that’s not our link…” Then what the heck are you sending me this link for???

They couldn’t or wouldn’t answer that question. But, at this point, I was dead in the water. My computer was dead. There was NOTHING I could do. I was furious. The technician got an attitude with me. Sure, I admit I was throwing attitude as well, but my computer was dead because of a link I thought to be valid as it was sent from Lenovo. I LOST EVERYTHING. I think I had the right to be a little ticked off.

Through my tears and shaking hands, I had to think. There was no way I could allow this to be the way I lose everything. Which, by the way, is a scary thing. We are SO dependent on our technology that we could really be destroyed by what is lost.  Sure, I had my book on there, but I still had my other laptop with the book on there. It was 20k words less, but I could recover. There are many people who have much more on their devices that it could truly be their downfall if they don’t backup to an External Hard Drive. I had updated previously to mine, but I hadn’t since I wrote those 20k words since my last backup.

I decided at that point, I truly had nothing to lose, so I started to play with the BIOS menu. To get to the BIOS menu from a dead computer, remember to use a paperclip or something to insert into the hole on the side of the Lenovo Ideapad 310 laptop to reset it. Learning what each option was. This was something my father did, so I had to have some of his brains for electronics, right? GUESS WHAT???? I found a backdoor entrance! I started by trying to restore to an earlier date. And sure enough, the issue WAS that driver update! Excuse the bad images coming! They were taken from my phone.

Well, the restore didn’t work. Tears came back while I continued playing with the BIOS menu. Yes, that day was very emotional. But guess what? I finally found the way to bring my computer back to life! I found the option to restore to factory settings. However, I didn’t want to do that because I’d lose everything! There was an option to reset the computer but keep your files. Wait, what??? Why was I not told this by the technician??? They apparently didn’t know. It wasn’t part of their training process.

So, I am including pictures that I took with my phone to do this. Please excuse the poor quality again!

This did the trick!  I was so proud of myself because I was my father’s daughter after all! LOL. Seven hours of dealing with this I finally had my computer back!  Lost a whole day of job searching, but the alternative could have been SO much worse.

With all this said and done, I will freely admit, I do love my Lenovo. The next day, I called Lenovo back due to how slow the computer was, they remoted into my laptop, did a few things and for the most part, it’s been fine. The features are great, the storage capacity is just what I need. I’ve been having fun playing with the apps that are part of the Windows 10 features. I would definitely recommend the Lenovo Ideapad 310, but also suggest you do not follow the links the box sends you on the side of your monitor. Go directly to the company website of what you’re needed to add or update.

Do you have a Lenovo Ideapad 310 laptop or one of their tablets? What has your experience been? Comment below or share on my Facebook page!

 

Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click on those links and make a purchase, i will earn a small commission. In which the government will laugh and gleefully take away from me. But I’ll at  least know that you really really like me! ?