Though it's a chunky handheld gaming PC, we highly rated the original Lenovo Legion Go (though we liked the Legion Go S SteamOS a fair bit more). Unfortunately, owners of the two-year old hardware are now reporting that a recent BIOS update is bricking their handhelds.
The BIOS update in question is version N3CN42WW for the Legion Go 8APU1. At time of writing, this was still available from Lenovo's support servers, despite user reports of black screens and ineffective BIOS self-healing following the update.
In a recent post to the r/LegionGo subreddit, moderators have advised users to not update and to 'just comment with +1 if you are [affected].' Beyond this, the scope of the issue (and whether every Lenovo Legion Go is affected) is still unclear.
One Redditor claims that when they reached out to Lenovo directly, the company allegedly quoted them a little over €237 (about $273) to repair their Lenovo Legion Go (via VideoCardz). This was because the Redditor's device warranty had recently expired. Lenovo is otherwise still repairing or replacing handhelds free of charge for those whose devices still fall within warranty.
One commenter wrote, "Had the same issue, I just [paid around €120 to reactivate] the warranty, I want them to repair it, not at my cost. This is insane."
At least one other Redditor has taken matters into their own hands with a fairly non-standard recovery approach of direct SPI programming. PitStop Computers has also reported on its attempts to find a fix. Despite all of the aforementioned reports, Lenovo has not yet issued an advisory notice about the latest version of the BIOS.
Long story short, if you've not recently updated your Lenovo Legion Go, sticking with an older BIOS version is probably best for now. If you have updated and are experiencing issues on a device with active warranty coverage, reaching out to Lenovo remains your best bet. Should reaching out to Lenovo not be an option for you, you may want to explore rolling your device back to BIOS version N3CN40WW.
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