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.