[TriLUG] OT: Lenovo Warehouse Sale

[Pete Soper]

Tom Roche wrote:
> Just what I get for not reading for a week:
>
> OlsonE at aosa.army.mil Thu Sep 10 14:46:23 EDT 2009
>   
>> Mark your calendar for Lenovo's first Triangle-area public warehouse
>> sale at Lenovo's headquarters campus in Morrisville. The sale will
>> include Lenovo notebooks, netbooks, desktops, monitors, and
>> accessories. High-end, highly configured systems will be available
>>     
>
> Just wondering: did "highly configured"==linux preloads? I'm sorta in
>   
Dream on, my friend...
> the market: my TP Z61t's battery died, and I can't find a replacement
> battery that will stay in, like if I actually pick up the box :-(
> But when I IRCed a Lenovo rep, s/he said their current laptops and
> netbooks are Windows, period. (Oh well, buying System 76 will no doubt
> improve my karma :-)
>
> One more question: how is Lenovo distributing information about the
> local warehouse sales? When I and they were both IBM it was pretty
> much word of mouth--has that changed?
>   
It was in the local newspaper and on multiple Internet outlets. But the 
best information was provided on this list by OlsenE: including the 
specific model numbers being offered. I was able to winnow the list down 
to the subset that are still offered for sale and that also meet my 
wife's needs.

But if this ever happens again, a few comments.

  0) IMO there were some nice deals and, overall, this was a very nice 
sale and a resource for the local people that beats the heck out of some 
kind of corporate 18-wheeler aggregation of surplus carted off to heaven 
knows where.
  1) Just assume every single thing you're told and every detail given 
to you on paper is well meaning and in no way involved with any 
conspiracy, but at the same time is likely to be 96.487% incorrect,  but 
that i's also likely correctable.  These are people doing this sale. 
Some of you know some of them. They're nice and they want to do the 
right things. But based on the result I suspect they weren't given 
anything like the proper time for vigilance wrt the nitty gritty 
details. Even floor-sweeping of stock into boxes takes work when 
warranties are involved (to state an extreme case that I'm not implying 
really happened).
  2) At the airport they make you take the gadget out and demonstrate it 
running, right? It would be nice to require this as a condition for sale 
of these laptops (while not ever physically letting go of the box and 
its contents). This would of course have to happen "out of band" such 
that you aren't hanging up other folk's (ill-informed?) purchases, but 
making it clear to the staff that they cannot either sell or re-shelf an 
item without facing the 
new/refurb/quasi-not-really-refurb-just-swept-into-a-box status of an 
item and negotiating a proper solution for each case.
  3) IMHO some of these IBM laptops are PRIMO for switching to Linux. 
Not clear what the Lenovo effect has been in the past couple years since 
the Thinkpad T-series were so well thought of as Linux platforms. But 
common sense suggests they will continue to use many of the underlining 
design details until there is some reason to change.
  4) Item (3) notwithstanding, I have to share that my stomach did a 
flip-flop when I got home from work and looked at my wife's "new" R500 
and discovered it has Intel TPM hardware in it. My first thought was "it 
will fit under the septic tank lid, but she's going to need an 
exceptionally good explanation of why I threw it in there." But the TPM 
was easily disabled and I'm hopeful we can just simply ignore this detail.

Regards,
Pete



> TIA, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>
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