Kramaric, support engineer at 2KDesign in Copenhagen, said this week that he has been trying to fix a problem affecting 50 Lenovo Group Ltd. (formerly IBM) ThinkPad T43 laptops for nearly five months.
For security reasons, Kramaric needs to provide two hard disk drives for each of the company's T43 laptops. While attempting to add the second drives from Hitachi Ltd., he discovered in June that 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, he said, just annoying.
"That wasn't very satisfactory for a premium computer," Kramaric said, referring to the T43, which starts at US$1,300.
It turns out that hundreds of other T43 users worldwide had noticed the same problem when using additional or replacement drives that Lenovo didn't support, according to user forums. Since May, when the problem was first noticed, about 100 users have posted comments about the problem at the Independent ThinkPad Open Forum site. Other users reported on the problem at different sites.
As a result, Lenovo on Tuesday posted a BIOS update that allows the T43 to start up without the need to press an Escape key when receiving a POST 2010 warning message. A note with the BIOS upgrade says that the 2010 message occurs when "using an unsupported hard drive version. Please use support version as much as you can."
The new BIOS version also appears on IBM's support site; IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo in May.
Users who had tried out the BIOS posted messages at a user forum Wednesday saying that it requires a user to wait 10 seconds and listen to a beep before proceeding. Nonetheless, Kramaric said he is eager to try out the fix, since he can provide Hitachi drives purchased on his own at half the cost of the Lenovo drives that came with the T43s.
But the experience left Kramaric and other users questioning Lenovo's commitment to support. "On a scale of 1-10, their score hits rock bottom at 1," he said.
A Lenovo spokesman and industry analysts said the problem was fairly minor and argued that the company's overall sales since the May acquisition show that users apparently like Lenovo products.
The POST 2010 error "is not an enormous issue, but one that we're aware of," a Lenovo spokesman said this week. "Certainly, people are upset about it, but it's not a hugely overarching issue.
"We were aware of the problem, created what we believe to be a useful solution, were disappointed that we had unhappy customers and certainly are doing our best to make sure they're happy," he said, noting that the new BIOS is only needed if a user adds a third-party hard drive.
The T43 issue arose at a time when Lenovo is trying to grow its customer base for laptops and PCs to include smaller businesses, taking the ThinkPad brand beyond the traditional large business base, Lenovo executives have said.
Richard Shim, an analyst at market research company IDC in Framingham, Mass., agreed that "a smaller scale" problem gained importance because it cropped up on a mainstream laptop that has probably been sold to hundreds of thousands of users. Still, he said, "it doesn't sound like (the problem) would have a material impact on Lenovo revenues."
In fact, Lenovo has nearly regained the market share with PCs and laptops that IBM had before selling off its division. Lenovo had 7.7 percent of global laptop and desktop sales in the third quarter of 2005, while Dell Inc. was the leader with 17.9 percent, and Hewlett-Packard Co. was second at 16.1 percent. IBM's PC division had about 8 percent of the market in the third quarter of 2004, Shim said.
Lenovo wouldn't comment on why the warning message was ever instituted. But Shim said many manufacturers of all kinds of products require custom or proprietary parts. "It's perhaps not great customer service, but the reality of doing business" for a lot of vendors, he said.