Joe T. Buchanan
I bought the Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q in late December 2018 and it was delivered in January 2019. I bought this unit mainly because of the form factor; any pc these days will provide the performance and specs of the M715q, but the small size was just what I wanted. What I did not expect ---as I was initially loading programs--- was for the system to have a general shutdown requiring everything to be reloaded...os, programs, license keys...thats a lot of trouble. But I did it and the system seemed to have no ill effects, so I carried on and used the system until yesterday (March 16, 2019). In the middle of a routine copy procedure from my iPhone to the Lenovo, the system stopped in its tracks. I let it sit for 15 minutes until it was quite clear that the system had hung on something, somewhere and I turned the machine off. A few minutes later I turned the machine back on, but it would it not boot. Instead, it gave me an error 1962: no operating system found. It looked like the same problem I had had back in January. I Googled the error code and found plenty of people advising me to change the BIOS to correct the problem, which I did but with no success. I contacted Amazon and they contacted Lenovo and I am working through diagnostics and support with them now. Yes, the system is under warranty and yes, Lenovo will send me a new SSD if we deem that to be the source of the problem. The Lenovo diagnostics take about 5 hours to run, so be prepared for that if youre in a similar situation. Mainly, I have two problems with this unit. First, there is almost no way to determine where the problem really lies. It could be the SSD, or it could be a bad SSD controller, or it could be bad firmware on the motherboard or something else entirely. Regardless, long term, this is not a good situation because playing hit and miss with the repair of a pc means that the problem may very well reoccur. Second, I have been using, building and selling PCs since the XT and 10mb hard drives. In forty years, I can easily count on one hand the number of PC failures that resulted in completely scuttled storage. Yeah, magnetic hard drives failed, but not very often and generally the content of the drive was recoverable. A magnetic drive (even the early 10mb varieties) had the ability to mark bad sectors and continue working. Apparently SSD does not have this basic feature. In my case, the PC has failed twice in the past 90 days and the storage device was unrecoverable in both cases. The second failure is far more devastating because Ive had 90 days to load programs, apply license codes, add data, etc. Reloading all of this once again is going to be a major pain in the rear. So having said what Ive said, would I give the Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q high marks? No. Its a fast machine and I like it a lot...when it works. However, do I have enough confidence in it to chance a 3rd failure? I dont know. I am hoping that Amazon (or Lenovo) will step up to the plate and replace the entire unit, but Im not holding my breath. Ill let you know how this turns out...