Lenovo gaming laptop owners have experienced issues in some reported cases due to a recently released BIOS update that went live in April.
Since its release a month ago, more and more people have updated the 'GKCN53WW' BIOS version, and there have been more and more complaints on various online forums (including Lenovo's own platform form) regarding serious problems found. after update. Windows Latest, which caught this, notes that the issues primarily affect Lenovo Legion gaming laptops.
The nastiness caused by BIOS updating in some cases includes blue screen of death crashes with 'DEVICE_POWER_STATE_FAILURE' error (or driver power failure) or even boot failure, and freezing during gaming sessions, as well as slow speeds. frame that drop a lot at times.
A Reddit resident posted: "I installed this on a Legion 7 16ACHg6 that I had for 7 months. After gaming for about 10 minutes, the laptop throttled severely for a few minutes. In terms of performance, it was impossible to ignore. Going above 75 -140 fps in FFXIV Online to around 15-20 fps This throttling would repeat approximately every 10 minutes.
"I went back to GKCN49WW and the problem is gone. Pretty bad error for a gaming laptop BIOS update that is considered 'critical'.
In fact, Lenovo considers this BIOS update a critical update to install, likely because it contains fixes for some nasty BIOS vulnerabilities disclosed by the laptop manufacturer last month, as well as a host of settings for settings related to energy.
Analysis: Avoid the update, then? You could, but it comes with its own risks.
First, we need to note that there are people on these various Reddit threads (and others) who have reported installing the GKCN53WW update without any issues. Therefore, it may be a relatively small percentage of Legion owners who experienced problems with this BIOS update; We can't know the exact numbers, of course, but how many Reddit threads suggest this isn't something uncommon, at least.
So, the best course of action might be to give the GKCN53WW update a break for now, possibly; But with that said, the aforementioned BIOS vulnerabilities are not something you want to let go of. However, you don't need GKCN53WW to fix them, according to Lenovo's security advisory on this, these holes are fixed by updating GKCN51WW (as well as GKCN53WW). So if you're already on 51WW, you're protected against these vulnerabilities.
The problem is, if you want to get GKCN51WW now, you can't, we don't know why, but the only option to download is the new GKCN53WW, with its possible crashes and framerate drop issues. Hopefully Lenovo fixes this BIOS update soon enough, but we haven't heard from the manufacturer yet, and in the meantime, you have the tough choice to update and risk failures, or stay and risk vulnerabilities instead. (If you're on GKCN51WW and managed to get this build before it disappeared, we strongly suggest sticking with it for now.)
If you update to the latest BIOS and run into problems, Windows Latest highlights that you can go back to the previous BIOS version, which is now GKCN50WW - it can be downloaded directly as an EXE file here (but of course it doesn't have those vital security patches). ).
To restore the BIOS of your Lenovo laptop, simply double-click the EXE file of the previous version you want to install and follow the instructions in the wizard that appears. You may need to enable the BIOS update to a previous version before you can restore it, which is done in the Lenovo BIOS setup screen; to access it, see the instructions here.
Once in the BIOS setup, there is an option related to BIOS version rollback and you need to enable it (note that on some Lenovo machines there may be a rollback prevention option that is enabled by default, and in this In this case, to revert to a previous version of the BIOS, you must disable it).
However, restoring the BIOS is a process that can go wrong, so do it at your own risk, and whatever you do, make sure the laptop doesn't shut down while applying a new BIOS (here's how you can do it). lock devices).
In general, not a good situation for less tech-savvy Lenovo laptop owners, who may not want to mess with BIOS rollbacks, but may feel compelled to, if the post-update crash issues are really bad. . And indeed, they might think it's better to sit in an older BIOS to avoid this scenario, understandably, but that's not ideal from a security perspective either. Therefore, I expect Lenovo to seek to resolve these reported issues as a matter of priority...
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