Stupendous Man

Finally, the Lenovo Engineer came in yesterday to replace the “Wi-Fi” card on my Lenovo Laptop. The guy was very friendly and that he was a part-time DJ helped.

Troy (the engineer who came to solve the problem. I hate calling them technicians), listened to one song on the Laptop and immediately said - “Thats a problem!”. Thank God! At least one of them could actually identify with the problem :-).

So within an hour Troy replaced the Broadcom wireless card with Intel Pro Wireless card, which is admittedly a better wireless card. I have the wireless card in other laptops at work, and they’ve known to work well… at least in my experience.

Rebooted the machine, installed necessary drivers, and voila! The sound problem was gone! Finally. I though so.

Came back home in the evening, and with nothing spectacular to do, I decided to finally ditch away my cables and start using the Wi-Fi.

All was well for a while, when suddenly I got a 404 Error. All of a sudden the wireless card broke its connection. Though the little icon still said it was connected, I could get nowhere.

My first guess: The DHCP server on my router screwed up. Hence to verify it, I run “ipconfig” on my command prompt, and what do I see?

The error in image below:

After this, the computer seemed almost non-responsive to anything. I tried to disable the wireless card and re-enable it - no effect. I tried using windows explorer to navigate to folder - no response. Eventually I had to hard-reboot the machine.

Once rebooted, the machine came up fine and dandy again. The wireless connection worked superbly.

Until it happened again. After 2 hours. Same routine - hard reboot - problem goes away.

After the second time, it never happened again last night, but this left a bad taste in my mouth. How should I trust this Laptop anymore now?

So I called up this Greg Brewer guy again, who is a Customer Relations Manager at IBM/Lenovo, who was up till this point very friendly and concerned. I told him about the new issue with the laptop.

His comment - Take it to tech support again.

As I tried to reason with about the quality of this Laptop itself in general, he told me his hands are tied and he could do nothing about it as it was a “new” problem with a new “chipset” and I would have to go through technical support round up again.

To my remark that Lenovo had sold me a lemon he became rude and told me that was not the case. (Oh hell yeah, after 2 laptops, 2 service depot changes, what do you think it is then dude?). I asked them then that Lenovo should simply tell me in writing that their Laptops don’t function, which of course he denied. He simply asked me rudely to get back to technical support if I had any wishes to get the issuer resolved.

I was almost contented that my problems were on the verge of being solved.

Nonetheless, my opinion about Lenovo remains completely unchanged.

Considering Troy’s remarks yesterday - he actually told me that he’s seen such “wireless” and “sound” issues galore with these new Lenovo laptops. He as much told me that he’s seen the wierdest problems with these new laptops too and my previous problem with it was one of them.

Why am I not surprised eh?

And, oh, Greg Brewer also mentioned that they had read my blog and the review. So someone actually read it :-).

Good start Lenovo. At least you are reading something.