I’ve used IBM Thinkpads for a long time. Upon leaving Adobe recently, I had to purchase my own notebook PC for the first time in many years. After asking around, and hearing that there was still no one else that matched IBM’s notebooks for quality (except perhaps Apple), I decided on a Z61t, a widescreen model with an SD card slot and better speakers, but otherwise similar to the T61 (the latest in the T series).

I’m not entirely happy with this machine and now wish I had gone for the T61 instead, but that’s another story. This rant is about IBM’s service.

Although now made by Chinese PC company Lenovo, service in the U.S. is still handled by IBM. My machine came with a keyboard that was loose at one edge and thus made too much noise. After checking the Lenovo site for warranty info, I was redirected to the IBM site to place an “electronic service call” (ESC). The web form required a full mailing address, but the form’s fields didn’t have enough characters for either the name of my street (Occidental Rd.) or my city (Sebastopol). So IBM collected a mailing address that might well not work for actual mail.

The form required an email address, but I never received any email from IBM throughout the process. They seem to have missed the idea of communicating with their customers.

Instead of giving me a phone number to call, the web site said that an IBM technician would call me. I was filling this out late at night, so added a note to please call in the morning. They called 30 minutes later, at 11:45 pm, when my household was asleep.

When I finally talked to a service rep the next day, he was pretty good. He suggested that IBM send me a replacement keyboard, so I didn’t have to send the machine back for service. He pointed me to a web page that showed how to remove and replace the keyboard. He was now about to ship a part to a truncated mailing address, but this turned out not to be a problem, as he had to enter the address into a different database anyway! When I asked about why he had to reenter the info, and why the web form had such short fields, he explained that the service call form put information into an old database, and that it was “very expensive” to convert the form and its records to the new database.

Isn’t this the sort of thing IBM is supposed to be good at?

Of course, the new keyboard didn’t fix the problem.

Later, I had a problem with the wireless range. The Z61t shows only about two-thirds of the signal level of a T43p in the same location. I braved a confusing, many-layered voice menu system and then a long hold time to get to a human instead of going back to the web form. The service tech walked me through updating of several different pieces of software, which of course had no effect (does this sound like a software problem to you?). At the end he essentially had nothing to offer, other than that I could send the machine in for warranty service, but what they would do was to reformat the disk and reinstall the OS, to be sure it wasn’t a software issue. This didn’t seem like a good option after spending three days installing software and configuring the system, so I decided to live with the mediocre wireless performance.

At one point in this process the service tech asked a question about my system configuration. I wasn’t sure of the answer, so I asked if he could verify it from the database. But oh no, that information was only in the sales database, not in the service database, and he didn’t have access to that database.

Maybe IBM isn’t doing their best, since after all supporting this computer is just fulfilling an obligation to the company to which they already sold their PC business. But these multiple, incomplete, disconnected databases and antiquated web interfaces are an embarrassment to a company that is trying to promote itself as a leader in the Internet world. And the fact that I had two problems with the machine, and they couldn’t come up with a satisfactory solution to either of them, was discouraging for a $2000 product.