Kramaric, a support engineer at 2KDesign in Copenhagen, said last week that he has been trying to fix a problem affecting 50 Lenovo (formerly IBM ) ThinkPad T43 laptops for nearly five months.

Kramaric needs to provide two hard disk drives for each of his company's T43 laptops. Last June, while attempting to add the second drives, which are from Hitachi Ltd., he made a discovery. After booting the machines with the extra drives, a "POST 2010" message would appear, preventing further steps unless the user pressed the Escape key. Nothing major, just annoying.

"That wasn't very satisfactory for a premium computer," Kramaric said, referring to the T43, which starts at US$1,300. Not Major, but Widespread

It turns out that hundreds of T43 users worldwide had noticed the same problem when using drives that Lenovo Group Ltd. didn't support, according to user forums. Since the problem was first noticed in May, about 100 users have posted comments about the problem at the Independent ThinkPad Open Forum site.

Last week, Lenovo posted a BIOS update that lets the T43 start up without requiring users to press the Escape key when the POST 2010 warning message appears. Users who tried out the BIOS posted messages at a user forum last week saying that the fix requires a user to wait 10 seconds and listen for a beep before proceeding. Nonetheless, Kramaric said he's eager to try out the fix, since the Hitachi drives cost less than half the price of Lenovo drives.