Plus 1 for Thinkpad and Lenovo support

I’ve mentioned before that I recently got another Thinkpad (t410). After receiving the laptop I’ve had wireless issues / performance problems with it. At first I just thought it was due to my wireless network. I use a combination of DDWRT and Airport Extreme to provide wireless to my house. The airport provides the wireless as a dedicated AP and I use ddwrt as a bridge at the far end of my house to provide some LAN connections.

My new ThinkPad was utilizing the ‘N’ wireless network and I figured that maybe the T410 and it’s Intel Centrino 6200 Advanced wireless card were incompatible with the ‘N’ version on the airport extreme. I spent some time adjusting the wireless settings on both the router and the laptop and still got an inconstant performance or just poor performance overall. In order to troubleshoot some more I disabled the wireless N on both the router and T410 and reverted to just “G”. After that change, there was no performance improvement. Basically the connections from the net Thinkpad were running at about 200k – 100k and dropping pings. I did a quick comparison to my old thinkpad (side by side) and it was getting around 7 Mbits per second.

After a few days of troubleshooting I figured I could just live with the performance, because I basically use the laptop for browsing and coding. This proved to be untrue, It was horrible when trying to move files and update sites.

So today I called Lenovo support and discussed my issue. The Customer Agent was friendly and very helpful. She walked me through 2 similar tests that I had done: Validate the settings and remove / reinstall the driver. After those tests, she asked if I would like to Send my laptop in for support to replace the wireless card. I referenced the lenovo thinkpad support forums I had been checking to see if others had the same issue.

I have been working in IT for many years and consider myself very familiar with ThinkPads, and do not like sending anything out for repair. I asked if they could just send the card and I would install it. She was very helpful and said they would do that right away. They are sending a card that will arrive in 1 day.

I hope someone at Lenovo reads this quick post and thanks their team for being friendly and helpful while providing customer support. I’ve been on the other end of tech support and appreciate it when someone is helpful, friendly and supportive.

Overall the call took 11 min, and that is a win in my book. Again, Plus 1 for Thinkpad.