Lenovo build quality

[trents]

Is it just me or have others here in the forum community who have worked on a lot of different brands over the years noticed that the build quality of Lenovo products seems inferior to most other mass computer producers?

I was given a Lenovo desktop by one of my small business customers the other day that they said had "died". I don't think it was more than two years ago that they purchased this machine and it was a higher end desktop with an i7 4790 and 12 gigs of RAM. Well, it wasn't dead but I discovered that it would spontaneously crash and restart when put under load. I examined the motherboard and there were no signs of capacitor or mosfet failure but it would restart after a few minutes of running any kind of stress test. CPU temps would quickly skyrocket into the 90's celcius. Upon further examination of the motherboard it looks like it is only a three phase VRM.

So I took the side panel off and pointed a household fan blowing into the open case and then I could run stress tests without issue. I bought an i3 off ebay to replace the i5 4970 as it seems obvious to me that the CPU was too much for both the VRM and the factory cooler.

 

[Blaylock]

I bought my son a Lenovo laptop 2-3 years ago for Christmas and it's still working fine.

EDIT:
Holy Cripes. It was 7 years ago!!!

 

[freakdiablo]

Eh, yeah a little. Had an X220 in college that was built like a cinderblock, while the T460 I currently use for work doesn't feel much more solid than many of the upper end consumer lines you'd find on the shelf in an electronics store. Keyboard's a little wonky as well, and had the ethernet port on my last one (a T450?) burn out on me. But I've got a little Miix 2-1 that's holding up (ignoring the little detail that I could never get the MicroSD slot working...)

 

[Woomack]

In EU distribution Lenovo is selling well only because of constant promo prices. Without any special promotions they sell nothing because of a really bad reputation and pathetic support. End-users do not always know about that and stores push Lenovo because they get additional benefits.
Think that in Poland which is one of the largest EU markets, there is no official support that fixes anything besides higher thinkpad laptops. Everything else goes to Germany because there were too many problems and local support companies don't want to repair Lenovo anymore (the same with Toshiba or Acer). Every RMA, even in the local support center takes 3 weeks+.
Another thing is that Lenovo is using cheap components nowadays and cheap materials. I had situations when because of overheating laptops were cracking in some places. Plastic was breaking or CPUs were overheating and throttling non-stop. The same in 3 different series.
Their top series like X1 Carbon are throttling but are also set to lower CPU power so the CPU always runs at a lower frequency than expected. I can compare something like $500 13.3" DELL to a $2.5k Carbon X1. Both with the same CPU but cheap DELL is simply faster and keeps higher CPU clock
Next example. My colleague got a T480 laptop maybe 2 months after the premiere. The motherboard was broked and he had to wait 1.5 months to fix it. This is how Lenovo support works for even higher series and this one wasn't even shipped to Germany.

In general, we are not buying any Lenovo laptops to our clients or employees anymore. There are too many problems with them. DELL or HP are offering higher quality products and much better support. Both, DELL and HP have 3 years+ NBD warranty with guaranteed 24h reaction as standard. Lenovo has nothing like that.

 

[trents]

Yes, I see a lot more Lenovo products in the etail sector like Amazon than I used to. They seem to be attempting to flood the market here in the US as well with their promos and price cuts. Similar to what HP did years ago but HP has improved their quality as well.

I note that Toshiba has gotten out of the laptop manufacturing sector.

 

[freakdiablo]

I note that Toshiba has gotten out of the laptop manufacturing sector.

Huh, it did seem like Toshiba was losing ground but didn't occur to me that they were getting out of it. I thought it was due to them being the "joke brand", with quality being down among the bottom rungs of Dell. Just quickly checked their Wiki page, looks like they sold a majority share of their PC business to Sharp a couple years back.

 

[Woomack]

I wasn't even following Toshiba as barely anyone wanted to sell them for longer years. I just got the info from one of the support centers that they canceled all contracts on Toshiba and Acer repairs 3-4 years ago because of too high RMA rate and problems with spare components.
HP is now pushing more with their additional support years and quick support response. At least in business, it looks much better than 2-3 years ago.
ASUS improved in last years but because of many series, there are problems with the availability of spare components.
There is also MSI but I have no idea what about their quality. They have their own support and I'm not selling their laptops because pretty much everything is for gaming.

 

[trents]

Seems like Acer has retreated into the Chromebook market. I don't see many Acer Windows-based laptops in the etail websites anymore and what there is seems to be mostly older stock.

 

[trents]

Update on the unstable Lenovo i7 desktop referenced in the first post. Turns out the motherboard was not the problem and is adequate for the i7. But there were three other problems. The PSU was failing for one. I replaced it with a PSU I had laying around the came out of someone's old OEM computer that bit the dust for other reasons. Another problem was the TIM was all dried up and looked like it had never made contact with the IHS except at the corners. Scraping the junk they used off and redoing the thermal paste with MX 4 lowered the temp 20-25 degrees. The other issues was not critical but the fan bears on the CPU cooler fan were very whiney and annoying, like they had already begun to fail after only about two years of service.

 

[torin3]

I just set up a friend with my old Lenovo Thinkpad for his CNC business. It was originally a Vista model, but I got it refurbished as a Windows 7 machine to give you an idea of how old it is. I think I had it for at least 7 years or more.

Only thing I did was fill out the memory and change the HDD to a SSD.

Still quite usable, though not blazing fast.

 

[Culbrelai]

It's a shame they bought IBM's x86 PC division. Quality has steadily declined since IBM owned it.