Sometime in the year 2011 Lenovo introduced a (what they tried to project as really clever) feature called InstantResume in their ThinkPad series laptops.
What this clever feature was supposed to do was to keep your network connection alive as you dunk your laptop lid to move from one conference room to another.
What this feature appears is to claim that even though your laptop will go into sleep mode (when you dunk the lid), somehow Lenovo will still keep your network connection alive.
In reality, what happens is something really dumb: Your laptop does not go into sleep mode at all – rather it keeps running. Moreover, Lenovo refuses to honor the timeout that you specified in the preferences (3 minutes in the screenshot above), so in essence, your laptop continues to run until it runs out of battery charge.
So if you’ve turned on this setting, and then at the end of the day you pack your laptop to head for home, chances are that the laptop stays alive within the bag and overheats, causing irreversible damage to the battery life.
That’s what happened to me. What a shame that I trusted Lenovo engineers to come up with a really innovative and helpful feature!
