3752 - The Green Door I

What could possibly be wrong with my new Lenovo ThinkStation P310? Well, turns out, a lot.

Basically I’ve never had a worse customer experience in my life. It all started out with my super-expensive hard drive not being available for a week. The dealer had advertised it wit 1-2 business days. Really not Lenovo’s fault, but it set the mood 🙂

Last Friday it was finally there. I unpacked it, opened the case to put in the data drive and … was dismayed. I have built a few PCs, I have seen a few PCs built buy companies like Fujitsu, but I have never seen something like this. It looked like a garbage can. Cables thrown in, unorderly, cheap parts and sharp edges everywhere, the SATA heads on the motherboard hardly accessible. So that’s for the heir of IBM’s PC business. I swallowed my anger, closed the case, started the PC and saw it boot … Windows 7!

Really. Windows 7 Pro! Yes, I had known that the computer came with both Windows 7 Pro and Windows 10 Pro, but I had assumed naïvely, that Windows 10 Pro would be preinstalled, with an option to downgrade to Windows 7 Pro.

Nope, so let’s search the box for the Windows 10 DVD. Tedious, but … where … no … can that … that can’t …

Turned out it could. Instead of a DVD I only found a sheet of paper with a URL. Grrr!

On my new Windows 7 computer I used Internet Explorer to call Lenovo’s support site. There I found that I had to enter the serial number of my computer (that was easy) and, lo and behold, I was eligible for downloading a Windows 10 recovery medium. I only needed to login with my Lenovo ID.

Lenovo ID? OK, I need one. Thankfully they allowed me to log in with my Google ID. Cool?

Not so cool in fact, because what sounds easy in theory, is pretty nerve-wracking when you are on a web site from hell. Lenovo’s support site is a web sie from hell. They even managed to deliver an internal server error on the support home page 🙂

Anyway. I finally could log in and on that download site I could even convince the page that I was already logged in. It had taken a few iterations, and I guess the majority of users would already have given up. I didn’t, I persevered and …

It turned out that they wouldn’t let me just download a damn installation DVD. Instead I had to download a program that would download the data and then burn it on a 16 GB USB stick. Imagine that: Lenovo saved 20 cents for a DVD, and instead they force me, the customer, to buy a USB stick and to burn hours and hours of my precious time in an attempt to recover what I’ve paid for and what should already have been installed.

When I started that program, it asked for my Lenovo ID (Ha! I’ve got one! Take this!!) and my … password? C’mon! I’ve logged in with my Google ID. I did’t use no freakin’ password!

Again I logged in to the Lenovo support site (I guess it was there that I encountered that hilarious “Internal Server Error”), went through a “reset password” routine (the only way to set a password), and finally I had my password. I entered it, download began, and it would take no more than a few hours.

After an hour or two I came back, only to find that the PC had gone to energy saving mode. My fault, yes, I should have thought of it. Anyway. I moved the mouse, the screen went on again and … the download program crashed.

Fortunately when I restarted it, it recognized what had already been downloaded. It tried to continue and … failed! No network.

A few reboots and a few “network repair” wizards later, I thought I’d try to uninstall the McAfee firewall and anti-virus product. And really, one more reboot and I had my network back. Carry on downloading, can we? Oh yes, I first changed the energy saving settings to avoid sending the computer to sleep during download again.

It took half of the night. When I woke up, I had already two thirds. An hour later I still had about two thirds. Download speed was at 10 kB/s. Another network problem? I decided to interrupt the download (it picks up anyway, doesn’t it?) and reboot, but instead of a proper reboot, I saw a message telling me that update 1 of 88 was being installed, and that I shouldn’t turn off power.

Great! My useless and unwanted Windows 7 had dowloaded updates, thereby starving the Windows 10 downoad program.

It took an eternity, but then I could restart the download. Finally I had everything downloaded and the download program started to format and write my USB stick. It did so and … failed. The error message was all but useless. I tried it again, but it told me that some file was missing and that I had to restart the process.

What now? Downloading again, only to probably find myself in the same situation? I was almost ready to give up, but I thought, well, let’s try to just boot from that damn stick. Maybe it has already been written.

And so it was. Seemingly the stick had been ejected automatically, and the program had not recognized it. It boooted and a weird custom installation of Windows 10 began, full of scary and useless messages. Needless to say that it also terminated with an error. Needless to say that the message was again completely misleading. Needless to say that in fact it was not an error at all. Instead I had … a Windows 10!

From then on, it was just the usual installation process. It still took me enormous amounts of time to move my data, it’s still not finished, but at least I have now what I should have already had out of the box.

Lenovo? Never again! I mean, granted, it’s not easy to provide a perfect customer experience, but delivering a known, virgin product, and delivering an update process that fails so miserably so many times, that is nothing but pathetic. In terms of customer experiences it was nothing but a nightmare. What do they think? I have a degree in Computer Science. I have built computers myself. I am their best-case customer, and even I was close to throwing in the towel, giving up on that included Windows 10 license, and simply buy a new one from Microsoft. What would a normal customer do?