Lenovo: What were you thinking?!
Yesterday, Lenovo (with no prior warning) turned off the single biggest advantage of the Thinkpad software offering: ThinkVantage System Update. What were you thinking?!
I’ve just reinstalled a fresh copy of Vista on my T61 (luckily on a new larger disk, so I still have the old install). Two days ago, all I’d have to do now was download and run ThinkVantage System Update, which would find and install all the individual bits of software, drivers etc that make the Thinkpad offering so great.
Now to have the full “ThinkVantage experience”, I’d have to trawl through the lenovo support site, download and individually install over 20 separate components. Many of them insist on a reboot, so this would take a very long time.
Lenovo recently asked on their blog which of the ThinkVantage utilities they should concentrate development on moving forward. Lenovo: if you kill ThinkVantage System Update:
- You may as well not bother developing ANY of the other ThinkVantage applications any more
- I may as well buy a Dell at half the price
I don’t have the time to find and install all these individual components now, never mind regularly reading your support website to manually determine if I need to upgrade them.
Because I have work to do, without ThinkVantage System Update I’ll be running a standard install of Vista. Just like I’d be running on any of your competitors laptops.
I’m not the only one to be disappointed by this:
- http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=367950
- http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_Interest_Utilities&thread.id=4397
- http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=74929
Update (1st June 2009): After listening to the mountains of complaining customers, Lenovo has reinstated system update.
April 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 am
Dude,
Try to buy, a Dell @ 50% cheaper. Dell lost price advantage when they sold their factories.
What planet are you living on..
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:20 am
@Dell Dude: I notice from your IP address you’re in Washington, USA. You should probably rephrase that last sentence “What country are you living in”.
Last time I bought was just under a year ago, and in the UK a well specced T61 was £1400. A similarly specced Dell D630 could be had for £750. Of course there are more competitors than Dell, I just picked them as an example.
In the USA the same thinkpad was selling for $1500, and I remember seeing very little difference in the dell price.
April 14th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
this is not True : here is a message i get when i try this
Lenovo’s method to update systems is changing. New updates for your system will continue to be available at http://www.lenovo.com/support. Launch System Update again in May to enable our new messaging system.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Palmi,
The advantageous to the expired System Update (SU) were significant; SU would see what drivers were installed based on the model of the machine and the Operating System being used and then reccomend the appropriate update. Once one or more of the updates were selected, set it and walk away. Some updates required a reboot. How simple it was. And yes, SU sometimes erred, but not often. The present system using the Lenovo driver matrix, or even the RSS blog is unbelievably complex, dangerous for the TP of the un-informed user, and extremly time consuming. For example, try to update Access Connections – there are a myriad of dirvers and programs that have to be downloaded, installed, and the entire operation completed in the correct sequence. It took me more than one hour to upgrade Access Connections manually, compared to five minutes using System Update. Imagine the inconvenience and non-productive time if this had to be done manually to a large company that had numerous Thinkpads.
Lenovo’s mesage, in part “Launch System Update again in May to enable our new messaging system” does refer to a new messaging system. This may be similar to their RSS system but why not state a “new System Update system” Many of us are waiting until May (2009-I assume) for a system that will update our drivers and programs automatically, without using Windows 7.
It is time for Lenovo to adopt many of the ethics and policies that IBM used with their customers, and not remove Think Vantage systems without warning and/or replacement.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Steve, you are spot on! Regardless of the cost ratio of Dell vs. ThinkPad, I am married to ThinkPad (I am on my 7th personal laptop and have installed scores of them for clients) and the System Update is a major reason why. For grins, I just updated my X200T tab with the driver updates in the second half of April and it took more than an hour (reading through the prerequisites, digging through my system to see if i had them all, reading warnings, etc, etc, etc. No way Jose! If they screw this up and back off the ease of SU, I am going to be exceptionally pissed off and disappointed.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I work on the move with my good old 3000 N200… often linked via the mobile phone. A quick update check over my home LAN using SU was the winner for me. If SU doesn’t come up soon then I’ll dump StinkPad as it SUx.