Lenovo Legion Go — Ultimate Starter Guide

so the legion go is now nearly a month old I've had mine for about a month and it's a really fun device I can't decide yet if this is going to be my daily driver or the new steam deck OLED that just dropped but I'm still enjoying it I even took it on a long train ride with me and that was fun if you watched my review you probably did see some of my complaints and in this video here I am going to show you some tips and tweaks that address almost every one of those complaints I have eight or so tips tweaks accessories that are going to help you immensely and not break the bank if you are a new owner of the Lenovo Legion go so let's get right into it starting with the SSD the Lenovo Legion go either comes with 512 GB of space or 1 terab of space I got the 512 GB and I want to upgrade my storage there are places like Micro Center that will do an upgrade for you but I just wanted to do it myself so I have this 2242 Drive I got a 1 tbte and there are a couple ways that you can replace the SSD on the Lenovo Legion go there are basically two methods that I'm going to describe here either you want a clean Drive method or the Clone Drive method for the clean drive I'm not going to get too deep into that here because it's pretty straightforward uh but if you do want to use a clean Drive you're going to want to get your own recovery media from Lenovo basically you go to the Lenovo support site you go to view product details you click on drivers and software and you select order now under recovery media follow the prompts that are given and select download digital you just need a US USB stick to get that done I'm going to leave a link to the Reddit thread that describes that in detail down below again it's a lot easier than trying to clone the drive you already have on the Lenovo Legion go so I won't go in depth on that one but let's say you've already installed some games and things like that and you want to keep your data that means you want to clone your existing drive and to clone your drive you're going to need two things you're going to need an SSD enclosure and you're going to need a free trial of a software called macum reflect so the enclosure that I'm using is a sabr enclosure it is tooless it can hold all M2 variants so 2242 2230 and the very common 2280 it has a really fast transfer speed and it has a thermal pad to keep it from overheating I've had a few different M2 enclosures and I would say that this one is my favorite so far as far as macum reflect it's a paid software that you use for dis management but there is a 30-day free trial obviously that's going to be enough for something like this annoyingly you do have to register using your email and all that but I would say it's worthwhile because it's going to make the job of cloning your drive really really simple so all you have to do is starting with your new Drive plug that into your enclosure for me I have this little nub that holds the SSD in place then once that's close I plug the entire thing into the legion go I open up macum and you should see two or three different discs show up in your legion go for me I had three discs that showed up on the legion go dis one was the internal disc the internal SSD disc 2 was the SD card that was plugged in and dis 3 was the new SSD that's plugged in via the enclosure so if you select dis one you click clone drive you select clone drive two and then select disk three for that because again that's the one that's the clean Drive in there and don't forget to clone all partitions and ensure that all the extra space goes to the C drive that's where you want the extra space to go this clone is going to take about 30 minutes it's not too bad but once it's complete your new Drive is ready now all you have to do is open up the legion go so I have this stabo repair kit and it has everything I need I took out the screwdriver the magnetic panel and a variety of pry tools uh I also ended up taking out the tweezers too that's going to help as well then on the legion go you just unscrew the six screws on the back plate from here removing the back plate is going to take some time but you have to open up the kickstand and pry your way around starting at the notch at the bottom it does once again take patience and persistence to pry around the entire back plate but I promise you you will get there I got there one annoying thing here was that the power button was really easy to press as I was touching around the the frame of the device watch out for that maybe drain the battery before you open this bad boy up in any case once it is open you can lift a sticker that is stuck to the connection of the battery and you can use that to help actually disconnect the battery now I do have a quick confession I tried to disconnect the battery I just couldn't get it done personally I got impatient and I moved on I do recommend disconnecting the battery but it is a little bit of a challenge to get your pride tool in there properly and push it out slowly the next step of course is to actually get the SSD out it is covered by another sticker this one covers the battery itself and covers the SSD so you're going to want to pry that off with tweezers it wasn't too bad to do that unscrew the SSD take that out the SSD is in a little sleeve so you want to carefully pry that off as well using tweezers and then you're going to take that same sleeve and apply it onto the new SSD plug that in screw it down reapply the battery sticker reconnect the battery if you did manage to get it disconnected reapply that sticker snap the back plate back on screw the six screws boot it up and hopefully you should have a bunch of new space now altogether this took me maybe 90 minutes 30 minutes was just letting it clone the drive and then 60 minutes to get it open replace everything really the hardest part was having enough patience to get the back plate off but I did get it off and I replaced the SSD and now I have a 1 TB so I'm pretty happy about that by the way there are also extenders that should allow you to use a 2230 Drive in here as opposed to the 20 242 drive and that might actually be a more cost effective way of increasing your storage since I do think 2230s are more affordable than 22 42s right now so something to consider if you want to go with a 2230 so another complaint I had about the Lenovo Legion go was that the matte plastic on there is prone to smudges and I have found the perfect fix and they are these Lenovo Legion go Skins from debrand as usual they are super high quality I've removed and applied dozens of different skins to my steam deck just with how long I've been working with dbrand now and the steam deck itself remains feeling brand new the Skins are even easier to apply on the Le and go because there are separate controllers and things like that overall they have a nice feel on the hands this skin here is the triple black it's super subtle but you can see the design as the light hits it it's great if you like something lowkey but there's also acid obsidian and magma seab breze and a bunch more you can also get the Lenovo Legion go glass to protect the screen both of these together will save you in the long run it's going to keep your handheld fresh for sure definitely check these out using the link in the description dbrand.com faneo I've been working with dbrand for a while now so I was very happy to hear that they have these Legion go Skins don't forget to check them out at dbrand.com fand too one more complaint I had in my review was actually the case that comes with the Lenovo Legion go it's pretty good it's just you can only store the Lenovo Legion go in there so even though I'm really glad it comes with a case and it holds on onto the base for the mouse as well as the analog stick you can't store the power brick much less any other accessories so for me I have to go with my trusty Tom talk bag it holds almost any handheld that I have the Lenova Legion go is one of the biggest ones and it holds that it's incredibly durable and Incredibly versatile but now they've updated the divider to be firmer and it gives even more protection to the handheld that's inside the bag and I can carry around all my accessories like the power brick the earbuds in their carrying case the basee for the mouse a US BC charging cable a lightning charging cable and I keep a screen wipe and some USB accessories too these bags have amazing quality they offer a 2-year warranty on their products and there is a special discount Link in the description so be sure to check that out all right before I go to the software tweaks that I want to tell you about I do have one more accessory to share because it fixes the last complaint I had in the unboxing of the Lenova Legion go and it was the power brick there are no collapsible prongs no detachable cable it's limited to 65 watts and so even though it's nice of course that they have one this power adapter from ug green has been a much better choice for me it charges more quickly but also more efficiently thanks to the Gan technology and you can charge your phone and the go at the same time and it'll still charge faster than the adapter you get with the Lenovo Legion go it has three USBC ports one usba collapsible prongs like I mentioned so it's even easier to store anywhere you can use any USBC cable that you want since it's detachable ug green does have some nice braided ones I use both their USBC and lightning cables this adapter is another one where I have a special discount Link in the description so check out if you're interested in upgrading your power adapter for the Lenovo Legion go all right so I also want to tell you about some software tweaks that you need to make sure you're doing if you haven't already number one is downloading the most upto-date drivers now the Lenovo Legion go team has been incredibly transparent and providing a lot of updates and so they are going to provide the ability to just do an overthe a up update for drivers using just Legion space but they haven't done that yet that's just on the planned road map hopefully by the end of the year in the meantime you're going to have to go to the dedicated site for the Lenovo Legion go drivers you can download the latest Graphics drivers so as of recording the date on the latest drivers is November 6 2023 and it's already been a couple weeks later but even that date is not quite accurate I think these are more like September drivers they released around the time of Starfield so you might still encounter issues with newer games like Lords of the Fall and Talis principal 2 and there is an unofficial way to get more recent drivers but if you're someone watching this video and you haven't done it already it's not something I would suggest I would suggest just waiting until Lenova brings the latest drivers to us which should hopefully be pretty soon in any case I'll leave a link to where you can get those latest drivers down in the description one thing I missed in my review is that you're going to want to set the OS power mode to efficiency for almost all scenarios I learned this after speaking to carrye AKA The Fox and the OS power mode basically has three settings things it's performance balanced and efficiency and it's a little bit counterintuitive because you would imagine that performance is going to mean more power is going into your graphics but the truth is it really denotes how much power is going to the CPU so what you want to do is set it to efficiency so that less power is going to the CPU and that allows more power to go to the GPU of course if you're doing something that would tax the CPU like emulation then you're going to want to set that back to Performance but just keep in mind that efficiency is usually going to be the best when you're playing video games all right the last software tweak I have for you is setting the vram you can actually do this in the Bios if you want to get to the BIOS turn off the Lenovo Legion go together when you're turning it back on hold the Volume Plus Button as you're pressing power that's going to bring you into the BIOS go to bios setup then more settings configuration than buffer size and you can set this to 4 GB a lot of people have been requesting 6 GB and that's currently not available but it is coming soon and it is actually available in a beta bios which again I don't don't recommend going out to get but if you do get it you can see that it does work at 6 GB vram and maybe this is dumb but I wanted to Showcase that the Lenova Legion go is actually a pretty good machine if you want to play games in Tate mode or portrait mode so good games for that are of course vertical schms like ikaruga blue revolver or dooni Resurrection but not just Shooters there are games like downwell Thumper and demons tilt that all support portrait mode when playing these games and the reason the Lenovo Legion go in particular is good at this is because the controls are removable and of course that means you don't have to contort your hands when you're rotating the display but also because the controls are removable you can actually stand the tablet up in portrait mode using the same kickstand of course it's not going to have the same range as when you're using the kickstand in landscape mode but it does work and I've played blue revolver quite a bit with it and it's pretty awesome now some of these games are going to take some extra work to get them to play in portrait mode sometimes but but it can be worth it depending on what you're playing and the last thing I want to say with the Lenovo Legion go is that there is a lot more to come there like I mentioned the Lenovo Engineers are being very transparent and open about what they're working on and they seem to be working on a lot it seems like there are a lot of late nights and weekends and things like that to get requested features implemented into the Lenovo Legion go and then of course there's going to be the community as well handheld companion is working on a version of their app that's going to work with the legion go so it's really fun times ahead for this device if you're still interested in this device I encourage you to check out different communities like Legion goli.com website the YouTube channel deck wizard which has been making a lot of videos for not just the steam deck but also Lenova Legion go and the rlg Ally and also newcomer bald Sea Lion Productions over on YouTube has been putting out a lot of Legion go content so check both of those channels out I'll leave links in the description they're pretty awesome and I hope you're having a wonderful week until next time that gang out [Music]

Channel: Fan The Deck

Views: 29,887

Keywords: PC Gaming, Steam Deck, Steam, ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go

Id: YRLELXg0W6E

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023