Lenovo "Support"

[W3WN]

Last August, we bought a Lenovo G-45 laptop for Little Miss Field Day to use as school.

Started having major problems beginning of March... case was coming apart. Turned out that a couple of screws had fallen out. No big deal... found the right screws to order, ordered them, put them in with a dab of Locktite, and all was done.

Just before finals, problems again. Same problem. Found out when she got home that a "friend" had managed to over-tighten the screws and had stripped the heads... but the machine was still usable.

The Boss & I decided that for her birthday, we'd just replace the laptop with another one, then get this old one fixed. It must have overheard us.

Last Friday, LMFD informs me that the laptop was taking "forever" to boot. As in an hour. Sure enough, you could hear the 'ping pong' sound of a drive going bad that had some sector read problems. So (after getting the OK from work) I brought it in to work to try and recover whatever data I could...

backup? do you think a college freshman should listen to her father who works in IT and make backups? surely you jest, and sorry, I'll stop calling you Shirley...

(And she did get her birthday present a few days early, but I digress)

So I try to see if I can get warranty support for the hard drive. And now the games begin.

[Gee, this is starting to sound like another chapter of As The Sun Also Sets in Crest. All I need are some vicious pit bulls, kittens, black widders, and a nun... ][no offense Pat]

Sunday.
Talked to the 'geeks' at the Best Buy where we bought the laptop. Warranty? Only 6 months. But their charges are... never mind.

Monday.
Went online to the Lenovo website. Surprise! 1 year warranty, up beginning of August. So where can I get consumer warranty work done? An RAC Service Center in Freedom PA, about an hour from here. Know what RAC stands for? Rent-A-Center. Great. No phone, no fax, no email, no hours posted, and if you go to the web site link, you get the RAC home page.

Just for the heck of it, tried Business support. Only 2 locations nearby. One in Greentree PA... turns out the company had been absorbed by PCM, that's also known as PC Mall, and the location is closed and they have no local location for warranty work. The other is the computer center at Duquesne University... they only do warranty work for students, faculty, and staff, sorry.

OK, so I now try, from the Lenovo web site, to have an online chat with Support. Ooops. Not available yet. Seems their hours are 9 AM to 5 PM M-F (closed holidays). Gee, and it's 10 AM EDT? Must be Pacific time, right? Tried multiple times on Monday, same message through 5 PM EDT.

Fine, so while this is going on, try emailing Support. Fill out the form... funny, all the states shown are from Malaysia. Very odd. Exit the site and re-enter, and this is what comes up when I put in the laptop part and serial numbers. OK, give it a shot anyway.

Tuesday.
The drive has now completely failed. BSOD time. Can't even get into the BIOS settings. Won't boot from CD/DVD or USB. Double plus ungood.

Get an email back from Support. Get into the BIOS, then run the recovery disks, which, by the way, will completely wipe the hard drive and reset it back to factory settings, so back up your data first. Duh. Well, I'm already past that point, and reply accordingly. Nada.

This morning.
Another email from Support. Sorry, they aren't US/North American support, they are ASEAN support. I need to go back to the website and try again, or call a toll free number.

--

You know, without going into the gory details, I remember what IBM support, even on the consumer side, used to be like. Now, I can't say I'm surprised that Lenovo (who built the machines for IBM before buying IBM out) isn't at that high level... but this is not what I expected.

Right now, my only real option is to pull the machine apart, grab the drive, put it in an external caddy and hope that there's something left there to read... which I'm sure will void the alleged warranty.

Fortunately, LMFD has her music on her iPod, most of it anyway, and most of her documents are on thumb drives, although maybe not in final format. So she hasn't lost much, maybe some pictures. And she WILL learn how to use the 1 TB backup I now have for her.

Meanwhile, though, I'm disappointed. And depressed. Well, it is lunch time. I wonder if anyone around here serves Ramen?

[PA5COR]

Looking bady eyed to my new lenovo laptop, hope the ssd or i7 processor doesn't fry....
Thoug mine is bought from a good friend's place and he repairs himself or has good connections with lenovo importers.
Hope you get it sorted though....

[KG4CGC]

Ron, other than being SOL, I think you're on the right path.

[KJ3N]

backup? do you think a college freshman should listen to her father who works in IT and make backups? surely you jest, and sorry, I'll stop calling you Shirley...

If, for one moment you think this is exclusive to college freshmen, I've got news for you. My wife, my M-I-L, and the D-I-L wouldn't know a backup if it bit them on the ass.

Now, the wife doesn't have to worry too much when it comes to her desktop. That's on the home network that has a NAS box consisting of two 4TB drives in a RAID1 configuration. If she can discipline herself to save most of the desktop stuff on the network, she's good. I'm not convinced that she's doing that, and I'm pretty sure that her work laptop (which she owns) isn't being backed up anywhere.

The M-I-L came very close to losing all her stuff. She was running on an old E-machine with XP. The first signs of trouble were the machine taking forever to boot. Sound familiar, Ron? She had a failing HD, but it was in the early stages. I built a spare W7 box and managed to get her data off in time. She still has no actual backup device.

The D-I-L was having window update issues with an older Dell desktop shortly after an "automatic" update to W10 and subsequent reversal back to W7 when several programs involved in tracking her daughter's T1 no longer functioned. I tried every trick I could find to get window update to start working again. Nothing worked. I wound up having to backup any data (Windows Easy Transfer to the rescue), restore the factory image, and restore the data. That machine has no backup device, either.

Myself? I make sure anything I don't want to lose goes on the NAS box.

[VE7DCW]

Ron....you forgot to add any mention of Pat's Town Car,for which I understand he now has a brand new vehicle to replace it.(Congrats anyways Pat on the new vehicle purchase if you happen to read this.Fodder for new QRZ threads for years to come I suppose )

[KD8TUT]

Hey: Hacker Tip...

Take that drive out, put it in a zip lock bag- and put it in the freezer for 12 hours. Then try to spin it up. The mechanicals may tighten up enough from the material contraction that you can get one good swipe at copying the data.

Good luck!

[koØm]

I don't know if this is relevant or helpful but, if you purchased the machine with your CC, there maybe be some warranty service available from CC company.

[kb2vxa]

"Take that drive out, put it in a zip lock bag..."
Uh oh, bad idea right there! Sliding along plastic is a great way to create ESD and pop static sensitive parts. They're not shipped in antistat bags for nothing, that's why I store my removable SATA drive I use for backup in the one it was shipped in and the same goes for my spare cards too. If you want it to work when you need it don't jostle the electrons.

[K0RGR]

My son takes care of his own computer disasters these days. My daughter usually manages to thoroughly destroy her computer when it needs to be replaced, so there is no great loss, anyway. My wife, a.k.a. "Amishwoman", now uses a nice IPad for everything, and if it gets screwed up, we call our son, the Apple guru. Personally, I have everything I care about stored in the cloud, so when the PC motherboard vaporizes itself, I am not deeply affected. I got that way from owning a long, long line of Lenovo/IBM machines - all of which have long ago been recycled when they went 'poof'. Sorry to say that about my former employer's stuff, but they started getting a bit junky even before they were sold, and since then, it's been downhill all the way. The cheapest ASUS out there does the job and if it breaks, it's no big deal.

Honestly, I don't know what Lenovo does with USB ports, but they are an Achilles' heel of major proportions. It always seemed like the death of the Lenovo machine, laptop or desktop, was preceded by a USB meltdown of some kind, and I don't believe it was the USB devices, either, because I changed them out when the PCs died. I usually took the hard drives out and popped them into a case to make them a USB drive, so I could save anything - something very rarely needed.