But the experience left Kramaric questioning Lenovo's commitment to support. "On a scale of 1 to 10, their score hits rock bottom at 1," he said.

A Lenovo spokesman and industry analysts said the problem is fairly minor and argued that the company's sales since the May acquisition of IBM's PC unit show that users seem to like Lenovo products.

"People are upset about [the POST 2010 error]," a Lenovo spokesman said. "But it's not a hugely overarching issue."

Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC, agreed that this "smaller-scale" problem gained prominence because it affects a mainstream laptop that has probably been sold to hundreds of thousands of users. "It doesn't sound like [the problem] would have a material impact on Lenovo revenues," he said. In fact, Lenovo has nearly reached the market share IBM had before it sold the vendor its PC division. Lenovo had 7.7 percent of global laptop and PC sales in the third quarter of 2005, and IBM's PC division had about 8 percent of the market in the third quarter of 2004, Shim said.