I almost had a W 701

[peon01]

I ordered a W701 about a month ago. I was pretty excited to see finally a delivery date. Last week I finally got it. As read in a review here the screen part was huge with a lot of plastic around the screen (definitely no design improvements there). Also the keyboard kind of felt a bit flaky (too much clanking). I mean my current T60p has a better keyboard feel after 3 years. But otherwise the screen looked very nice and the laptop felt pretty sturdy.
After playing around I decided to shut it down and start to install my Newegg stuff. Well as soon as it shut down it automatically restarted itself. Turns out I could not turn it off: even the power button when depressed for a long time would not shut it down. It was obvious it was a hardware issue though I had to spend 30 mins with Customer Service that insisted it was a Windows issue (even though the power button did not work either). Eventually she told me that they would send a technician to my place.
The day the technician was supposed to come by I called support to check the time he would come only to find out that the case number hadn't been processed properly and basically there was no request to send someone out despite what I was told by the lady in support.
To me that was strike 2 with Lenovo: my T60p has worked without a problem for 3 years (only a fan replaced) and a brand new $3500 laptop was broken out of the box (and it seems would have required a motherboard replacement). I was willing to overlook that since I wanted to believe that they are still a better company and figured that maybe I just had bad luck. But once a simple customer service request could not be handled properly I was not about to take the chance on a contractor technician taking apart a relatively new model and then putting it back the right way and maybe experience strike 3.
So I lost it just returned the laptop.
It is a shame and I guess today all brands are the same and there is no point in brand loyalty (I really thought Lenovo was better than Dell and HP). I guess now I am again back to the drawing board on deciding what laptop to get.

[pianowizard]

This is the one to get:

http://67.214.227.38/~thinkpad/forum/vi ... 58&t=89006

[peon01]

Hi pianowizard,

Everyone seems to get all excited about DC2 on HP. However great the screen looks like (and it does) there are a lot of other issues with HP:

- Only 1 HDD drive (unless you give up the DVD drive). A very weird limitation considering the size of this thing.
- A lot of issues so far with them, including not working with more than 8 GB. Probably they will all be fixed eventually but they have not so far and it is worrying it is taking so long.
- Much higher price compared to W701, M6500.
- Their website is so confusing (the ordering page). Not a big deal but you would think it would be the easiest thing to get right.
- And I may be wrong, but I am not sure if they have the "next day on site technician" option like Lenovo or Dell.

I am kind of stuck now since the only logical option now is Dell. They have been on the market the longest with the least amount of issues. However, besides my preconceived opinion about Dell, nobody seems to have completely figured how to correctly calibrate the Dell screen which is puzzling to me since Lenovo has that software out of the box.