I’m batch 2. My DIY FW16 arrived last Wednesday and it took longer to download Windows than it did to get my RAM and drives installed. I’d seen so many videos on YouTube, the whole process seemed familiar. I’m now typing this message on the keyboard, which is feels far better than I was led to believe by some of the complaints. I have no complaints about flex.
I do, however, have a problem. Early on my fans didn’t sound right. Specifically, the fan on the right side, at low speed, sounded like a film projector. A little faster and it reminded me of being a kid and using clothespins to attach cards to my bicycle spokes. At high speed it seemed to sound more normal but of late, pushing the machine to cause the fans to really ramp up creates a sound on the right that is reminiscent of a dentist’s drill.
I’ve been in contact with support and they’ve been responsive. I’ve provided them with the information that they’ve requested and I presume that they’ll take care of me. But here’s the thing:
I put in my pre-order last summer but so many times I considered cancelling and getting something else. In particular, I looked at the Legion Pro 7 with the Nvidia 4080 GPU. I never pulled the trigger because I preferred the AMD option with the 16 core CPU but it never seemed to be available in this country. It finally became available on the Lenovo website but I was hesitant because I read comments from people who purchased only to see shipping times slip and change, with no contact from Lenovo to explain when it might ship. Then I saw the Reddit posts from so many people who had trouble with their Legion machines. Granted, I realize that most people are probably happy customers with no problems. I don’t care about them. I care about the ones who had problems, because what I didn’t see were comments saying, “Lenovo took care of it.” Instead, I saw comments about how customers had to ship off for repair only to see their machines disappear into a black hole. Others got service only to have the repair cause more damage.
All of which is to say, I don’t know what would happen if I’d gotten a Lenovo with a bad fan. I’m pretty sure, though, that just getting another fan from Lenovo and popping it in myself wouldn’t have been an option.
So here I am. Worst case, I buy a $29 fan from Framework when they become available, and install it. I just timed myself reinstalling the bad fan that I removed to get photos for Framework. It took me 6 minutes and 15 seconds to go from start of the process to rebooting to the home screen. Yeah, I could have gotten more GPU performance for the money, but man, there’s something that is just so comforting knowing that I can replace basically any part that needs to be replaced and keep this machine running like new.
