We recently purchased 100+ Lenovo Thinkpad SL500 units.  We ran into a major issue with a large chunk of them having issues connecting to our LAN via the wired Realtek NIC.  It turns out there are a couple of fixes, none of which include a driver or BIOS update.  Either the IO card has to be completely replaced, or a capacitor has to be soldered onto the IO card.

The symptoms are that when you are on AC power, the NIC will connect at 10/mbps and half duplex.  If you force the switchport to 100 full and the computer to 100 full, the unit simply won’t connect at all.  The funny part is, if you run the laptop on battery, there are no issues.

Dealing with the tier 1 techs was a bit of a headache.  The high level techs at Lenovo have identified the issue but I guess it hasn’t worked its way down to the front line support.  Tier 1 support actually wanted me to return all of the laptops because we didn’t purchase on site support.  This was the first time I’ve ever yelled at any support person on the phone, which I generally don’t do because most of the issues I have aren’t their fault at all, but I lost it this time.  Finally after about 5 business days of constant badgering and being slowly pushed up the support tree, I finally got on the phone with someone who could make things happen.  And they did make things happen, FAST.  I was up against the wall to deploy these units and they flew a tech out that night to start working on the issue.

The issue was completely over the tier 1 support and I can’t really blame them as they probably don’t often have someone call with more than a 100 busted laptops.  I can blame them for not moving up the tree quick enough, but in the end, the issue was resolved.  I’m impressed that Lenovo didn’t leave me in the rain and are sticking by their product and their mistake.  Too bad software companies don’t follow suit when they release shit software and charge hundreds of dollars to even talk to an engineer.

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