While looking for a replacement power adapter at Lenovo's outlet store, I came across the following: 

Nice work!  While I fully expect that the store is hosted / managed by a 3rd party vendor that Lenovo has chosen, publicly available debug info of this nature isn't a good idea.

I just like to share my hell experience with others. As a new customer of Lenovo, I can't ask for any customer experience worse than these. I ordered a laptop, went through the configuration: double and triple checked. When I got the order cofirmation, I notice that all the items were taken the default: not the one I selected. I sent an email to websales@lenovo.com immediately (with 2-3 minutes). I waited for the Thanksgiving long weekend, no response. I sent another email from my another email account (just in case if it was blocked): no response. I just sent the third email from my work email account while waitig for 45 minutes on the phone.

Finally, someone answered my phone from oversea (just my wild guess). She told me that the order is in process and she can't amend the order. I need to call the sales team. Alright, please transfer me to your sales team. Oops, she said their line is down, please call back tomorrow!

I couldn't believe what I heard! Lenovo customer service sucks! It will be the worst customer service in the planet! Wish me luck that I can have my laptop upgraded.

November 18, 2009

 

Bill DeLong

Vice President, Americas Services, Lenovo Americas

Lenovo
1009 Think Place
Morrisville, NC 27560
USA

 

Dear Mr. Long,

 

I recently purchased a Lenovo laptop from Amazon.com. Despite preordering it, my order was delayed by two weeks. However, on November 3 I did receive my order. And thus began my woes with your product and company. I ordered an Ideapad U350 with the ULV Intel SU 7300 1.3GHz processor.

 

1. Upon receipt I inspected the machine to note that there was a label that said Intel Centrino 2 inside. Amazon and your website description mentions Intel Core 2 Duo inside. Confused, I called Amazon who routed my call to Lenovo. Your unhelpful representative mentioned that she could not answer my question because I had purchased the product from Amazon. I was taken aback as she did not ask for a serial number, model number or any other information to help me. After all, I was now a Lenovo customer regardless of where I purchased the computer. Since then, I have reassured myself by searching Intel’s website and a Google search.

 

2. I created a system disk image using the One Key Recovery feature. My laptop came preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium. Because I found the features too limiting, I upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. I desired to update the system disk image, but was unable to do so. I called Lenovo to request information on updating this disk image (as if I ever needed to use the One Key feature, I wanted it to revert to my Windows 7 Professional settings); your representative was poorly equipped or trained to answer my question. One would expect a tech support specialist to be knowledgeable about the products and issues they are working with. But not at Lenovo. Besides this poor knowledge, he kept reading a screen to answer my questions. The answers obviously not relevant to the problem at hand.

 

3. I also asked your representative about another issue I was having a week after the purchase. The mouse kept freezing. Not knowing whether it is a hardware or software issue I asked your rep for some help. But once again, he could only guide me through the standard install / upgrade driver process which has yet to resolve my issue. I was on the phone for two hours and am afraid to engage in such an unproductive conversation again.

 

I have owned HP computers since 2000 and have been very satisfied with their products and service. I have found the reps to be knowledgeable, really trying to go out of their way to help me. This time, I decided to ‘switch’ it up with Lenovo as currently you own the ThinkPad brand of laptops, once part of IBM. However, I wish I had conducted better research before my purchase. It seems like my issues with your products and services are not unique. Your community forums are practically useless. Mark, your resident admin on the forum, basically ignores messages. And so is your phone support. I am not sure if you are aware of this, but the Better Business Bureau rates Lenovo an ‘F’. I hope this is of concern to you -- it would be to me if I wanted to retain my existing customers and gain new ones.

 

Now only if I could find a buyer for this laptop on eBay, I’ll be happy to offload it and never turn to Lenovo again.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Pooja

A very unsatisfied and disappointed NEW customer

Have a tale to tell of a Lenovo 3000 N200 and the failure of Lenovo support to send a functioning rescue and recovery disk.

I suffered a blue screen of death, on the laptop which holds all my small business files. Not good, but made so much worse by the fact that this was a Lenovo laptop. The rescue and recovery sector, supposedly impervious to corruption, was corrupt, and inaccessible. F11 did nothing, and I was left with an expensive paperweight. Thanks to Backtraking and a bootable virus scan program, I was able to determine that my hard drive was fine, and access all my data for copying. Clearly, the problem was with the software, and all hardware was fine.
Unfortunately, I had to turn to Lenovo to send me the disks necessary for recovery to the original factory installed state. The initial order was placed, and paid for ($51.00) and I waited for 6 days to receive it. On the sixth day I called for a tracking number and was told that though it was in transit "now" a number wasn't available. I questioned that, and point blank asked if the order was just being placed. I explained that this was an important business computer, and that I needed those disks yesterday. I was assured that they were "on their way" and the tracking number would be available by the next morning. I was also told it was "Microsoft's fault". Yeah, right.
Next morning, the girl who answered told me I didn't have a tracking number because I had "just placed the order yesterday". I said no, I placed it a week ago. She argued with me, like I made that up, and told me it would be about 4 more business days, as the disks had to be "special ordered". I told her this was unacceptable, I wanted the disks, I paid for them, they were needed, and I wanted them NOW. Supervisor entered the line at that point. Promised to find out what was taking so long. That took him all day. Some "glitch" in the system, you see. Riiiight. I now had been blatantly lied to 3 times. Patience wearing very thin, I made it plain that if I did not receive the disks by the following Monday, I would cancel the order. Voila, I received the disks. However, the first disk, which boots the next 6 (yes, 7 disks, kid you not) didn't even go to the first screen and came back with a "bad media" error. I called, and they tried to get me to send my computer in (out of warranty, nets them big bucks). I told them I knew I had only software issues, and therefore would not fall for this BS. They sent out another set of disks. The second set, although going through all 7 disks this time and making it look good, did not restore my computer, and did not reinstall Windows. Tried it twice, which took approximately 6 hours. Ended up with an error that one of the recovery files is corrupt. I have had enough. I will redo this hard drive with whatever version of windows I have laying around, give this piece of crapola to my nine year old for his games, and buy myself anything but Lenovo. Low quality product, incompetent customer service and shady attempts to get me to send it in for expensive "cures" I don't need? These lies and games I do not have time for. Lenovo sucks.