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I have had absolutely horrid support from Lenovo. I love their machines, but pray that I never have to have any interaction with the company. The story follows.
by phlyingpenguin 12y ago
I have had absolutely horrid support from Lenovo. I love their machines, but pray that I never have to have any interaction with the company. The story follows...
I got an X1 a few years back while in grad school in another state. My experience with the company started out poor when their fraud prevention made it nearly impossible to buy the machine. Making sure several forms of identification referenced my location and where the product was shipping (why does shipping have ANYTHING to do with purchasing!?), I ended up being unable to ship it to my desk at school, but did get the product to my apartment at least. All of this made the order several weeks later than I had anticipated, not that I had things to get done or anything. I know this doesn't have to do with product support, but it's foreshadowing.
Half a year ago, I spilled some water on my laptop. Disaster. In fact, my wife had done the same thing a week earlier to her Lenovo as well. Both keyboards were dead; we had to use externals until we could get the issue resolved. Funny, because the X1 has little holes through the keyboard to drain as though it is at least somewhat resistant to such things. It isn't.
I called the support line and actually felt like I had gotten pretty far until the guy on the other end quoted me something like $400 to repair the machines. What? I just need keyboards, that's not going to happen. Turns out full service repair out of warranty is crazy from them, I should call the "parts department" at one of three numbers he gave me and order the specific parts for manual repair. Okay, now I'm getting somewhere. I wanted just the parts to begin with (and thought I had asked for that). Of course, figuring out which of the random phone numbers was correct was another labor of pain.
We called the parts department for two months. They're open for exactly eight hours a day and the wait is no less than an hour in our experience. Pain. Eventually, we got through and received the keyboards for around $50/ea. I'm not new to repairing laptops, I just wanted the exact parts that belong in the computers at a reasonable price.
My X1 is several years old now and still chugging along. Someday its battery won't be sufficient and I don't know if the X1 Carbon will tempt me or not. As a Linux user, Lenovo is the safest bet I know of for laptops so I'm fully expecting that I'll deal with all of this again someday.
- Someone1234 12y ago> why does shipping have ANYTHING to do with purchasing!? Because that is an extremely effective way of detecting fraud. If someone's billing address is in location X and their shipping destination is location Y (e.g. X = Washington State, Y = Florida) then in terms of your fraud score, it shoots through the roof. This goes astronomical if it is cross-country (e.g. billing in US, shipping to Mexico). If you're a student it might be worth your while calling your bank and having your billing address moved from whatever your home state is to the state where you plan on living. If you're doing online billing this won't have much impact day to day, but will make it so you dodge most fraud protection. Unfortunately most (all?) banks don't allow you to add multiple addresses onto a single account.
- phlyingpenguin 12y agoSo I do understand that and did at the time too. My point there is that it doesn't change that I should be able to ship something I buy wherever I please. My story abstracted the many support calls to try to work around their inflexible fraud prevention. It just highlights the toil of trying to work with a company uninterested in their customers.
- MichaelGG 12y agoI bought an X201t, got a 3 year warranty. I've gotten everything replaced multiple times. Mostly because it just gets so damn hot. Apparently heat is something most people simply don't notice. Or isn't penalized enough in reviews. But I just call up or use the online tool, and next day a wonderful person from IBM is replacing my fan or motherboard. Even for damage like me dropping it on the floor and cracking part of the case, no questions, free replacement, no problems. Dell only beats it as I called them up while traveling and they actually sent a guy up a mountain in Guatemala to replace a failed HDD. Perhaps you didn't get the next-day warranty?