Lenovo, Good, Bad or Ugly?
July 8th, 2008 by PaulWell as far as I can tell from my experience of dealing with Lenovo, bad would be the word that comes to mind.
When I was traveling in Asia I was hitting the Internet Cafe’s fairly regularly to take care of work among other things, so when I got to Hong Kong I decided I’ll get myself a cheap laptop to save me the hassle of going to so many cafe’s and take advantage of the free wifi in my accommodation. I new before I bought the laptop that lenovo were at the bottom end of the ladder when it comes to quality but I thought it can’t be too bad IBM have a share in them and even give there employees Lenovo laptops.
I bought it in Hong Kong anyway and the sales guy that sold it to me was brilliant, told me that it had international warranty and that if anything happened you could easily get it fixed. Well anyway after traveling for a month I noticed a dead pixel on the screen, not to much of a big deal but it was still in warranty so I would get it fixed when I returned to Ireland. Further on in my travels the wireless card started droping, still doing it now and every now and again the trackpad starts going a bit mental.
So I had 3 problems with my PC and its only 3 months old, not to happy but you get on with it, but the wifi constantly dropping is a complete pain. So I called Lenovo on the number that was on the world wide warranty card. I reached IBM tech support and they tell me that they can’t log my call cause I don’t have a product type. It seems all Lenovo laptops from Asia don’t have this, only Lenovo laptops from EMEA. So I have to call back 3 times in total to get some movement on the issue.
Lenovo don’t have any process in place to deal with laptops from different parts of the world being returned in other parts of the world. So as it stands now there trying to figure out how to deal with me as IBM Europe don’t know what to do.
I can actually confirm my warranty on the Lenovo website, which is the main problem, cause they can’t log my call if my laptop is out of warranty, so there system doesn’t allow it.
Its highly ridiculous that a company as big as Lenovo/IBM can’t seem to provide a simple tech support service. Its making my life difficult and making them look bad.
Ah well, at least I have my trusty Mac to work on, rarely a problem there.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I’ve had the exact same experience and I would never recommend a Lenovo to anyone. I’ve been doing IT long enough to spot a badly managed product line.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Use a T61 as my main device, never been left down by it
Maybe I am just lucky
July 9th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Have been using T61, Y410 and R50e. Haven’t got any issues yet, i hope there wont be any issues. But somehow feel sorry for your case, you’re just the unlucky one that you have to fight harder a bit to get it fixed
Good luck!
July 28th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Yet another vote for a T61, I have one for the last 9 months and it’s great. I got the higher end version (1900×1200 res, 2GB RAM, thumbprint reader).
I found the track pad going mental aswell, but it was due to dirt on the RHS of the box. Try and give it a clean.
Paul
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
From another perspective we signed up to be a reseller for Lenovo in January 2007 and they been an excellent company to deal with. We sell and repair all major brands, Dell, HP & Fujitsu Siemens and we went to Lenovo after we started to have a number of issues with the previous brand we sold.
From my experience there is no perfect PC brand but in the main Lenovo has been very reliable, competitive etc.
Reading forums, blogs etc. it seems that somebody somewhere has been treated badly by one of the major brands and understandably their opinion of that brand is then tainted. However we look at it differently and if the majority of the PC’s & notebooks we sell are trouble free then we stick with that brand.
It’s unfortunate you’ve had a bad experience.
October 24th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
What exactly is wrong with it, hardware problems? Because if it’s software problems, meh, who gives a damn. Software support makes a computer manufacturer not.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I use a T60 for work and Ive had no problems so far. I have a Dell laptop at home that I much prefer but the Lenovo seems to do it’s job, no complaints.
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am
I’ve had the exact same experience and I would never recommend a Lenovo to anyone. I’ve been doing IT long enough to spot a badly managed product line.