Had to return two new Lenovo 500s

My 1 year and 10 month old Acer 9300 laptop crashed and I was told by two techies that I would have to replace the motherboard. It was impossible to contact or communicate with Acer Canada to get one and to make a long story short finally gave up and bought a Lenovo R500 Thinkpad. On the second day I was getting notices about an initialization problem (whatever that is ... I'm a technopeasant) so the retailer exchanged it for a new one. The same thing happened to the second one on the first day so I returned it for a refund and finally bought a Dell Inspiron 17 from Dell's website which is scheduled to be delivered on November 11. I was tempted to try a third one but needless to say I was quite nervous about doing so. I bought a Dell based on testimonies from friends who have them and have been very pleased although I've also been told (rightly or wrongly) that Dells just ain't what they used to be. I'm curious why I would have had problems with two Lenovos when they have such an excellent reputation. To me it is rather a long shot that that would happen to two Lenovos in a row unless there was a problem with a batch of them made around a particular time. The only other problem that I could think of was the possibility that perhaps something nasty was transferred to them when all my files were transferred to it from the Acer hard drive although the techie at the retailer who made the transfer found nothing abnormal as everything was being scanned during the transfer. I wish the Lenovos had worked out because I feel confident about their reputation and being IBMs. Any opinions?

 

Honestly, we can't tell what your problem is because you didn't really provide any specifics.

Also you cannot generalize a brand such as Dell or HP as being good. They both make some junk and both make some good laptops. What you were concerned with (and what many consumers are concerned with) seems to have been a software issue.

But in general did you consider the Thinkpads to be built better? I do not think very highly of Dell's consumer lines.

Also don't type in huge blocks of text please.

 

when you say problem with virtualisation, do you mean it doesn't run? The feature needs to be activated in the bios under CPU, where the virtualisation option is switched off by default.

 

I have heard of many horror stories involving Dells. I lived in a dorm my freshman year of college, and literally over half the people who had an Inspiron had some kind of hardware failure.

My roomate who had a Latitude had no such problems.

I'm not making any generalizations, but after those experiences, Im afraid of even touching a Dell

 

Inspiron = Engineering for failure within one year. usually just pass warranty , then it should fail

 

Lead_org. The window said Initialization not virtualization. After I saw the error mentioned on the screen it operated fine but it unnerved me especially seeing the same thing on the second one. I'm at the mercy of the knowledge of lack thereof of the retailers and their service departments and their sales pitch.

Jaredy ... I'm not trying to generalize that Dell or HP is good. I'm a 65 year old retired technopeasant who's just trying to make the most sense of a technology that's all Greek to me. I'm much more at home and comfortable with the technology of paper and a crayon. The pitch I got from the Lenova retailer was that as you suggested, they were built better and were essentially IBMs. If it was a software problem than I'm at the mercy of the retailer to recognize that possibility. Since they offered to exchange the first one and refund the second one I would assume it was a hardware problem.

Stewie and Yun ... Your opinion of Inspirons may well be valid which is why I bought the three year warranty. Not being knowledgable about computers I decided to go with the experience of people I know who have them and hence Dell. A Mac was tempting but beyond what I wanted to spend. If I had it to do over again perhaps I should have bought something where the warranty can be serviced instead of being at the mercy of having to send it to Dell if necessary. Posts in this regard is not too encouraging. By the way Stewie, I'm a big Family Guy fan.

 

If you aren't going to be situating your notebook to a rough environment of constant moves and such I think a basic computer of any brand is fine if you get an onsite warranty.

Can one of your friends help you clean up the system though? Most laptops come with a bunch of extraneous junk on it.

 

Oh sorry, read it wrong, i thought it was virtualisation, got woken up by a siren bell at 3.30 am.

 

While I'll agree that the Latitude line is better, the above is just plain and outright false. I've seen plenty of Inspirons that have lasted longer than that.

 

"Inspiron = Engineering for failure within one year. usually just pass warranty , then it should fail"

"While I'll agree that the Latitude line is better, the above is just plain and outright false. I've seen plenty of Inspirons that have lasted longer than that."

I'll agree with lonewolf in that I used an old Inspiron 9100 while I was in the hospital and it got me through. Of course it was built on old school philosophy.

Renee

 

Inspiron are okay, but it is not as strong as the more expensive Latitude brothers with their external magnesium casing. Don't like silver painted plastics that wear off, which Inspiron seems to be covered with.

Cheap and chic...

 

Very true. I'm a big fan of the Latitude D620/630/820/830 designs. Also of the E6400/6500 (though in these, the ThinkPad's keyboard and trackpoint win hands down).

I take more issue with the "Inspirons are crap" thing, though. I've seen a lot more dead Acer and HP consumer-level systems than Dell. The Inspirons I've seen that have died have usually died to to carelessness or abuse. Inspirons aren't built the way their Latitude bretheren are --but as consumer systems go, they're not crap, either.

 

HP and Acer consumer laptops are the worst, i have experienced many failures at the hands of these manufacturers.

 

Some of the HP/Compaq business lines from the nx/nc line weren't much better, back in the day. I've seen quite a few that had problems with solder joins weakening, causing loose chips and unstable behavior. Those problems were also heavily documented in HP's IT support forums.

The dv home series seems to have heat problems in a number of the AMD-based units, and the plastics are cheap regardless of which processor platform is used.

 

talking about the dv series, my friend's AMD Turion one is having heat issue just one year after purchase, and he never takes out the laptop, he only use it on the desk. Talk about bad quality.

 

Yep. I have a friend whose dv is based on a Turion X2 RM-70. There are places on the top of that laptop I can barely touch due to heat, and every time they're connected via their USB Verizon modem, the CPU fan stays on constant high revs. Unfortunately, there isn't a cooler running processor I can put in it. Like your friend, it's used only on a desk.

On paper, it's a good unit. Reality is another story.

 

this brings back memory of my Compaq laptop where the motherboard failed enmasses, and the US customers got free repair or replacement out of warranty, and we the Australian consumer got nothing.

 

IMO, things haven't been the same after Carly Fiorina headed the company, and Hurd has just made it worse yet. The merger was ill-advised, and now slash-and-burn has cut much of HP's creative talent even as it gets rid of deadwood.

 

Acer, a Taiwanese manufacture, seems to have a worse build quality in comparison to the the big 3.

I can totally believe that.

 

Carly got a private jet for jetting around the world, so she could slash more of her staffs...

 

Acer does lot of secondary manufacturing for the other laptop companies, i think either Compal or someone else was a spin off from that business venture.

Acer is using price as its ultimate weapon, it wasn't always this bad, you could only slash so much off a product price, before it starts to affect the overall quality. Toshiba has gone on a similar cost cutting route as Acer in the recent years... now they are a niche player.

While, Dell and HP have tried various mixes in an attempt to lure more customers from the other players, not all of which was successful. So now for most part, Dell and HP have a clear distinction in the product line when it comes to consumer and business lines of products.

 

My coworker has a HP dv2000. It was overheating for months on end with the wireless shutting itself off randomly. No reboots would fix it. It was a hardware issue. If the wireless wasn't working it would take a few hours to a few days before it would work again and be seen by the OS. Thank God the ethernet still worked else it would be completely useless. Eventually after the few months of overheating, the laptop died. He had the motherboard replaced (out of warranty) and it's still overheating. Total crap.

 

My now defunct Acer was never moved except for two months after I bought it when I took it to Florida for a month where except for 6 nights of travelling there and back when I was still very careful with it taking it into and out of the hotels where we stayed en route, it stayed on a table in the house we rented on the Gulf. After returning home it stayed on the same table until it crashed approximately a year and a half later. My point is that it was rarely moved and was never abused. The only thing I can think of was that when I had it, it was turned off and on perhaps three times daily on average and perhaps it was the constant heating and cooling resulting in regular expansion and contraction that may have caused the problem. Maybe these are obvious questions to you experts but not to a technopeasant like me ...
1) When the new Dell arrives should I always leave it on all the time?
2) Do I have to set it to go into hibernation or do they do that automatically?
3) Does that prevent heating/cooling, expansion/contraction or is that just a power saving function?

By the way I love this site and you guys. Is the net great or what? I bought a lawn tractor several years ago based on a gardening site and got excellent help from tractor experts. The engine blew once because of mice getting into it over the winter but that wasn't the tractor's fault. Even then advice from one of the tractor guys saved me several hundred dollars in getting a new engine.

 

1) leaving it all the time isn't a real problem, but rather the mechanical parts like fan, spindle hdd don't like to run all the time, since dusts and motor wears out.

2) You will have to set hibernation mode through the windows power management feature.

3) For most laptops this is not the major problem, when the components are properly designed. If you don't do much games or GPU intensive work, get the integrated GPU (or those hybrid gpu setup in the thinkpads, where you get both the discrete and integrated gpu).

Also, for CPU get those cheapest P8xxx (i think P8400 is the good entry point) one if you don't use CPU intensive work. If you do a bit of CPU intensive work get the cheapest T9xxx option.

 

Just because I'm curious, where did the error messages occur? It sounds extremely similar to the AMT/fingerprint reader errors my T400 throws up when I don't shut down correctly, or make changes to AMT or to the TPM.