Okay, let me get it out there in the open: I love Lenovo!
A few years ago when I had heard that IBM was selling their PC division to a foreign company that I had never heard of before, I had reservations. However, my tune has changed to the complete opposite since owning two ThinkPad laptops.
I want to specifically talk about my recent dealing with my T61p laptop and the problems it was having. After moving home, I opened up my laptop for the first time and booted up into it (Running Ubuntu 9.10.) I opened Skype to call my girlfriend, and it closed in the middle of dialling. Other programs continued to crash for no reason. Running them from the command line, some of them were segfaulting, others giving odd errors. I tried to do an apt update/upgrade, wondering if there was a problem with the recent upgrade I had done earlier in the week. However, even that failed. Wondering if my linux install was b0rked, I booted into the Windows 7 install I had on the same laptop. Explorer.exe crashed right away, and would not run. I knew something was amiss, but as I had a very busy week coming, and I had just moved, it wasn’t on top of my priority list. Looking at it later on, I concluded (from running a LiveCD and doing some HD Diags) that it was not the hard drive, but either the motherboard or ram that was the problem.
I then decided to call up Lenovo, as last time I had a problem they sent me out a box to put my computer in, I sent them out my computer, and within a week I had my computer back with no problems. Calling Lenovo customer support was a great experience. I was in automated prompts for about 30 seconds, then on hold for another 30 seconds or so before speaking with an actual human being. He was clear and asked me a few questions about my laptop, and about the problem I was having. I explained that I was not the average joe with computers, and he seemed receptive and didn’t ask me non-important questions. He sent me an ISO for PC doctor, which would do a checkup on my hardware (Get it, checkup, doctor? haw haw) and it immediately failed on the RAM, but passed all other tests. I then ran my own Memtest86+ test on the RAM overnight, and it returned over 38,000,000 errors. I then called Lenovo back, and once again was talking with a real person within a minute or two. I told them my case number, and explained the results of the PC doctor test and my own. They then confirmed the type of RAM I had, my address, and told me that my RAM should be there tomorrow. I was so impressed, but I hardly believed that I would have the RAM the next day. Lo and behold, the next day came, and at 9:30 AM the UPS truck rolled up and delivered my RAM. I swapped it out, and it works perfectly!
I am very impressed with how this was handled by Lenovo, and would recommend both their products and buying the extended warranty with them. This is exactly the way that customer/technical support should be handled.