Post warranty and tech support?

If your thinkpad is out of warranty, can you still call the tech support for help (not to get free repair, but just to ask about the problem)? A while ago when my thinkpad had problem (don't remember what problem, but it's a rather minor one) and I called, the guy was very impatient and stressed "this is out of warranty", hinting that he should not be spending time talking to me, even though it didn't take a long time at all.

 

Well they are not obligated to help you at all if that's what you're wondering...

 

I see. So he was good enough not to have hanged up right away

 

Well, I don't think you get much better Q&A support when your machine is on warranty. Let's face it, support is great when you have hardware problems (and they will be happy to take your money and do the repair also when it's out of warranty.) But for software support you will get much more attention and better advice in the Lenovo forums. And if you are seriously mistreated by Lenovo support I see the escalation path thru Mark Hopkins, Mark_Lenovo in the forums, working in a number of cases.

 

zillal, indeed, when I had some problems within warranty and called, I was told it's software problem and that they were not supposed to help with it. They said they only deal with hardware issues, and there is a separate group handling software problems that charges hefty fees (even in warranty) for phone calls (something like $$/per min call). Is that true?

 

In software its not so easy to determine if its defect or non-defect support. I think they are responsible for defect support and clearly they will not do non-defect support except at a fee, the grey area is problem determination. Anyway I wouldnt even try calling support for software until I first was absolutely sure thru the Lenovo forums that it was defect.

An example is the switchable graphics driver for T400/500 Vista which hasnt worked properly since they introduced the machine in August. Well the forum thread now has 340 posts, earlier in the year there were a couple of hundred of us who all called support at the same time around the world. There is a beta driver out but that has stilll a lot of documented problems. Mark Lenovo has been monitoring the situation and has now posted in the forum that we will have the new driver next week.