Lenovo ThinkPad R61 user reviews

0.5 stars

"My worst laptop ever!!!" on February 13, 2008 by amcgreg

Pros: Prompt service response

Cons: Unreliable poor quality especially for a ThinkPad

Summary: I bought this R61 two months ago thinking I would be worry free. From the beginning my 80GB hard-disk showed 90% full although I only had vista and office installed. Correction, it sometimes showed 85% without me deleting anything. Booting the computer took at least 7-8 min on a good day. Running programs was slow as well, not at all to the performance I was expecting. Also, the machine was freezing frequently. IBM sent me a new hard-disk in a couple of days and I installed it myself by acqurately following all their instructions. Then I ran into some other problems like blue screens, restarts and blue screens again. Freezing kept occuring. I asked for a new machine but they explained they could not give me a new machine unless my laptop has been sent to their service 3 times. This was not the IBM quality I was expecting.

0.5 stars

"This is the worst laptop I have ever worked with..." on October 21, 2009 by horribleproduct

Pros: pretty close to nothing because it is so slow that I do not care about any of the other features. One positive I guess is that it is relatively quiet when it is working.

Cons: This is the slowest laptop I have ever used. It cannot handle even the simplest of operations.

Summary: this is trully the worst laptop I have ever had...beats the one I had 5 years ago in this regard. I would never recommend for anyone to get it who is serious about using a computer to do pretty much anything. Not even for users who only need it for Word and browsing the Web.

1.0 stars

"Does not function on a basic level" on October 8, 2008 by cerenturkita

Pros: Good screen resolution

Cons: The computer is really slow... early 90's slow. It constantly freezes, takes more than 2 mins to open up any application, takes a very long time to boot, reboot and most of the time...it doesn't shut down unless I hold down the power button!

Summary: I bought this machine in the beginning of June for basic personal use - document processing, surfing the web, and downloading music. No complex media software, no gaming - and bottom line, this computer does not function for basic operations. Like I said, it is early 90s PC slow. It freezes constantly. On average, every other application I try to open, causes a 2 minute mini freeze (this is only with 2 applications running simultaneously) Once the application opens, it freezes again and I had to wait another minute to actually navigate the application. Rebooting takes 8 mins on average, I don't even want to bother, and initial booting time is the same. The worst part was trying to shut the computer down. It doesn't shut down
After my friend told me she was having the exact same issues, I consulted many IT experts about my computer's issues and they all blamed it on Vista. So, I took the "rescue and discovery" discs they send with the machine that allegedly contain an XP downgrade and that caused my hard drive to crash.
Which brings me to the next joy of owning a Lenovo. I purchased a high-grade 3 yr extended warranty - which has proved to be absolutely worthless. I spent, no joke 4 hours and 50 mins on the phone with customer service, based in Atlanta. I could not believe how little they knew about these machines. I felt like I was describing the malfunctions to an 80 year old attorney. They could not keep up with my descriptions of malfunctions, and didn't care to follow up when they didn't understand - thus the 4 hours and 50 mins were consumed. They were literally like "sorry, no idea m'am" and did not offer to do anything about resolving the issue that my hard drive crashed! I had to get really aggressive with them until they finally agreed to 'allow' me to send my computer to the depot to get the hard drive checked out EVEN THOUGH they admitted that there was they could do to resolve the problem through tech support. One of their theories was that the search and destroy discs were faulty (thus causing the crash) but, sorry m'am, they cannot send you more discs and they cannot sell you an XP downgrade because microsoft won't let them.
After reading some of these reviews, I don't even know if I'll get this computer back, and frankly, I don't care. I never wanted to use it because it was so slow, I didn't have the patience to wait for it to boot. And I REALLY don't want to have another conversation with their customer service. Please excuse the cynicism. Just a little aggravated over here.

2.0 stars

"Waste of money" on September 4, 2008 by AUJenV811

Pros: Can't think of any now that I'm stuck with this dud of a machine.

Cons: I have had this computer for one year and I've already had to replace the hard drive twice. Tech support told me this just happens with their machines. It is slow even with XP and 2GB memory. Many applications freeze for no reason.