I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T420. I ordered it in late 2011 through their website. I wanted to buy a Windows free laptop as I use Linux. I called them up. They agreed to send me a Windows free laptop at a reduced price. All hassle free and quick. I have never had any problems with my system and hence never had to contact Lenovo. I personally highly recommend Thinkpads.

When I bought my customized Thinkpad my credit card rejected the purchase as unusal spending. This was of course not Lenovo's fault but for some reason even after I got the billing issues straightened out, Lenovo still wasn't shipping my computer. I figured I'd give them a chance so I waited a week before finally calling. They were very apologetic and ended up overnighting it to me to remedy the situation. This meant I actually ended up getting my computer earlier than I should have since it usually takes a couple weeks to get a custom computer shipped. So as far as I'm concerned it was a very positive experience and I'll continue to purchase laptops from them.

Lenovo has had some problems with suppliers in August and September. My order of a custom laptop a year ago was super-quick, and I've only been hearing about it taking multiple weeks to get a laptop shipped since mid-August. I've only heard about bad customer support with Ideapads (edit: also the only complaints I've heard were from hysterical bad customers), and Thinkpads are known for having good customer support, with a separate customer support department. I had great turnaround time on getting problems fixed 6 years ago.

A recent datapoint on shipping speeds is that a W530 ordered Sept 28th arrived at the door on Oct 18th.

Actually I'm hearing its awful from people waiting for Thinkpads to ship too.

I purchased a w520 just under a year ago. It did take a while to get. Approx 3 weeks, but I did customize it. I'm extremely happy about the purchase. I do remember a funky issue about 4 years ago with my address or something.

What kind of "issue" are you worried about? Microsoft doesn't help you? I had a HD failure with one about 4 years ago, and I didn't have any issues.

I've not had any problems and we've ordered 63 machines from them since July. To be fair they are not customised ones though.

As for support, all companies suck but they are several orders of magnitude better than HP and Dell. We've had not had anything break for a year or two which is good and when we did (a t420 doa), it was resolved in 4 days.

You might try a third party reseller. For some reason, ebay seems like the place to get new thinkpads. I guess they also have a large refurbish market there, too.

I just bought a t430 off of a reseller there - needless to say, it wasn't customized but I got it in a few days time. It also cost around $150 less than the lenovo website.

One side note: some international Lenovo sites (notably, the Dutch one) offer a very unimpressive selection. Obviously, this doesn't hurt you if you're in the US.

(I ended up buying a refurbished T61 from our local eBay equivalent. Really cheap and works great.)

Bought a customized T510 during Christmas 2010 online from lenovo website. Absolutely no hassles with shipping. Dunno if things have changed since then though.

The reason I love Lenovo is for their build quality.

The x230 or X1 Carbon are great. I have an x220 and recently put OSX on it. I got mine off a forum, though, so I can't say how well the online ordering process works.

Expect to wait a month regardless of what lenovo says. Also, apparently ibm retirees can get you a crazy discount at lenovo. I personally really like my T530.