E520 display blank between "starting windows" and logon screen

Hi all,

A strange thing I have noticed is the following. When booting Windows 7 x64 on my e520, right after the "Starting Windows" screen (glowing windows flag) my screen goes blank for 5-15 seconds typically. It is not a black screen but as if the screen is off. After 10-20 seconds the logon screen appears as normal and everything works normally. Note that this does not happen every time I boot... sometimes it is off for a quick moment and the logon screen appears. This is how other laptops I own and have worked on boot with Windows 7.

This is a clean install of Windows using the latest drivers and BIOS available on the Lenovo website. I have tried using the latest graphics driver from Intel's website and the same thing happens. Disabling all non microsoft services and startup programs (a clean boot) does not resolve the issue.

Unintalling the graphics card driver in device manager or booting into safemode solves this so it seems likely to me that it is a video driver issue.

Now I do not know if this is happening to other people with E520s but it doesn't happen on any of my other laptops, Lenovo or not. To clarify, the boot process goes like this for me..


POST Screen
"Starting Windows" screen with glowing windows flag
Screen goes off for 5-15 seconds
logon screen appears
This is a Think e520 without switchable graphics so that is not applicable.

 

Thinkpad E520 boot issue - YouTube

Here is a video of what happens. Ignore the audio (the beep is not from the laptop).