I’ve been doing IT support for a third of a century. In that time I’ve seen a lot of strange things, but this week I’ve had two first that have left me exasperated.
I had a client that wanted to purchase a new laptop. They had a Lenovo, and were quite happy with it and wanted to purchase another one, but not spend a lot of money. I suggested getting a refurbished ThinkPad from Lenovo directly, which includes a year warranty, and they agreed. We selected a model, I found a coupon code that saved 35%, the client was quite happy. We ordered on August 29, and when it arrived they scheduled a time for me to set it up, which was this past Tuesday. Since both old and new machines had Windows 11, I thought it would be safe to use the Microsoft migration tool, which I had tested a few weeks ago to good effect. However, things seemed to have gone awry when everything came back online with the new machine and it showed that Windows had not been activated yet. When I tried to activate it, it kept failing saying it was an invalid key. My guess was that the migration tool had brought over the key from the other device and caused the error. Unfortunately, I had run out of time, so I promised the client I would address it today. My plan was to just factory restore the machine, and bring over everything manually that didn’t come over already via OneDrive and then install Office and QuickBooks. But I wanted to give Lenovo a chance to see if they might be able to provide us with the correct key. I called their support line, and after an interminable time on hold, finally spoke to a rep, and I explained that we were having an issue with activating Windows on this machine that we just purchased from them. After giving the rep the order number, the name on the order, the email address on the order, the serial number, and a callback number, the rep assured us that she could get us to the correct department to fix.
After several more minutes on hold, we heard a series of beeps, and then got transferred to…an automated assistant (grrr). We annoyingly tried to navigate the menus (without success) before finally getting to speak to a person. After explaining the situation to this rep, he had us jump through a whole ‘nother series of hoops, and finally told us that the key had reached the maximum number of activations and that we would have to purchase a new key. At this point I became incensed, saying that there was no reason for my client to have to purchase another key when they had provided us with a bogus key to begin with. He said there was no record of us purchasing the key, and I shot back saying we didn’t purchase a key, it was included with the machine we bought from them. After several more backs and forths, I said, “You are Lenovo, right?” he said, “No, this is Microsoft.”
So, apparently Lenovo sent out a machine that (presumably) had had a part replaced on it, and therefore deactivated the Windows license on it, and then when I called into Lenovo, they transferred us to Microsoft for activation…but they didn’t tell us they were transferring us to Microsoft!
Of course, by the time we got done with the call, the Lenovo support line was closed for the night, so I get to call again in the morning.
