It’s just over 8 months since my IBM T42p went properly titsup for the final time. This week, I finally received a refund on the purchase price (which, er, would have been without a hitch except for it being refunded to the original credit card used to buy it which actually belongs to my stepfather). Thus the case is closed thanks to the efforts of Tomas at Lenovo, whose predecessor got in touch with me after seeing a blog post on the subject.
Some statistics:
- The T42p had a total of 15 trouble-tickets logged against it, stretching from broken hard disk to bad display to busted motherboard.
- The average time-to-fix went from 4 days the first time (owned by IBM), to 8 months the final time (owned by Lenovo).
- The mean time between failures decreased substantially once the Lenovo purchase had gone through.
- Average time waiting on a phone line just to be given a ticket number was 45 minutes.
My experience may not be typical – however, in the course of the whole debacle I have been in touch with many, many IBM owners who have had the same sort of trouble. I only hope that they have an eventual result also.
Epilogue: We have used the refund to purchase Nicky a MacBook Pro, and still had change left over to help pay for our holiday this year. IBM are still selling the T60 at a premium, and in this case the Mac is cheaper and more reliable. Go figure.
July 3, 2007 at 12:11 am
Eesh – those stats sound terrible. Can you offer up the raw data?
I’ve been on the brink of going for a T series for a while now, and one concern I’ve had (other than price) was whether quality of service would falter in the longer term.