Category Archives: Lenovo

Lenovo Customer Support, Again

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You’d think that my Lenovo customer support issue (wrong configuration delivered) would have been solved by now, more than seven months after I bought the laptop.

No.

The current email exchange with Digital River, the company handling Lenovo in Europe, stands at 32 messages as of today. Add to that a dozen or so emails exchanged with other Lenovo representatives. This is what they look like:

Thank you for contacting the Lenovo Online Store.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing. We are currently looking to find a resolution for you. We will keep you updated until this has resolved. If you do not receive an email from us, please check your junk/spam folders.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing. If you need Customer Service assistance, please call +353 61725061 to speak to one of our representatives.

Sincerely,
John B.

This is a form email – they’ve probably not added a single word of their own. The person signing the email is never identified by his or her full name. For all I know, these names could be made up.

It also really doesn’t matter what you write to them. The reply is more or less the same: we’re working on a resolution, we’ll update you, check your spam folders if you don’t hear from us. Etc. And nothing happens until I contact them again.

Why do I even bother?

Lenovo Customer Support, Part Two

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After a month of very little action but me being sent back and forth between support and sales at Lenovo to address what should have been a trivial problem for them to solve, I decided to write a review. See, they’ve sent me these “Following your recent purchase…” emails about once a week after I bought the laptop in April, asking for a few words to be published on their website, and I decided to comply:

Great Laptop But Abysmal Customer Support
The laptop as such is great, but Lenovo’s customer support is among the worst I have ever experienced. They’re slow, they like to pass around your case to each other to cover their tracks and play the blame game, and they don’t respect European consumer legislation. You’d think paying for 3-year premier support would help you avoid this sort of thing, but apparently not.

Of course, they turned it down. I replied to ask them what they thought was inaccurate in my review, but of course, the reply-to email address bounced. They encouraged me to write more content, though, so I copied the original review and my follow-up questions into one, and hit Publish.

They refused it again, using the same form letter and the same no-reply address, so I figured it’s all worth a blog post, at the very least. Lenovo, if you’re reading this, I will make my best effort to spread the word.

New Laptop

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(If you’re not into Linux and don’t know what “Wayland” is, I’d suggest you to skip this post.)

I’ve bought a new laptop to replace my aging Dell XPS 15, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9. The XPS is good, make no mistake about it, but I wanted something lighter with a better battery life on Linux, and the X1 Carbon fit the bill. I also went full Linux this time. No Windows partition this time, just the latest Ubuntu, even though I’ve been trying out different desktops because I want Wayland rather than X11, and Cinnamon is not moving to Wayland anytime soon.

A few obstacles:

The Lenovo customer support is atrocious. My 4k screen was delivered with the standard black lid rather than the carbon fiber woven one, which does seem like a very minor complaint, and initially I treated it like one. Lenovo did the same. First no-one wanted to take responsibility, then I was told I was wrong because a screenshot of the current state of the Lenovo web shop suggested otherwise, and finally I was sent back and forth between sales and support, and this is where I am right now. They’ll get back to me really soon now, I’m sure.

The new Intel graphics chip is not well supported on Linux. It lags behind, with a characteristic wait-what-did-he-just-click-on half a second when deciding to use the touchpad. A mouse connected through a dock doesn’t have this problem.

Gnome 40 (which I installed through a PPA since Ubuntu 21.04 doesn’t include it) is just too different. I like the gestures, and the Wayland implementation actually feels like it’s getting somewhere, but the PPA is buggy and the DE is just too different.

KDE 5.22 on Wayland (installed through a backport PPA) is very cool but XWayland doesn’t seem to scale properly if your laptop is HiDPI, which mine is, so anything rendered through it is blurry if scaled. Non-scaled output is great, though. KDE 5.22 on X11 does look good, though, and I am thinking about moving back to KDE again.

Cinnamon looks great on X11, of course, but there is no Wayland. Also, there is that weird lag.

I guess 2021 won’t be the year of the Linux desktop either.

 

WiFi Woes

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Just a little note for posterity:

My Lenovo T61 laptop that now runs Debian has an Intel 3945 ABG wireless network adapter. While the Debian (Lenny) installation and the subsequent upgrade to Sid went flawlessly, with the WiFi card discovered and listed, it wouldn’t connect wirelessly to my Netgear router (actually a repeater, fed from a Netgear ADSL modem/gateway). It connected to the router itself, I was able to ping the router and connect to it using a browser, but everything beyond that was inaccessible. I tried various interfaces stanzas, reconfigured TCP/IP, and tested all kinds of tricks, without any success.

Then I did some serious googling. A lot of people have had this problem and many probably still do. Also, the problem was pretty much the same, regardless of your Linx flavour. Finally, a Ubuntu forum suggested removing the network-manager package and installing wicd in its place. Said and done (luckily I had upgraded to Debian Sid; the package is not available in Lenny). I had to reboot but could still not connect.

As a last resort I tried explicitly pointing out my ISP’s DNS server IP addresses in the wicd configuration. That did it and I’m now writing this blog on a WiFi connection.

Sometimes it’s important to document these things. Maybe, just maybe, it will help someone else.