Before I start, let me make a few things clear. This is not a post to criticise the staff providing the service, nor is the service provided by the staff not up to par. It is also not a post concerning the quality of the product but a post to point out the frustration a friend recently experienced with a Fujitsu product.

My friend has been a system integrator for at least 8 years. Recently, a customer’s laptop – a Lifebook S7111 – failed due to a hard disk failure. After replacing the hard disk, my friend attempted to restore Windows XP to that laptop.

Normally, there is a quick and easy way to restore the OS (Operating System) to a laptop – just use the manufacturer’s Recovery CD. Unfortunately, when the customer bought the laptop, he downgraded to Windows XP but and for some odd reasons, Fujitsu had shipped the recovery CD containing Vista along with it.

A quick call to Fujitsu to obtain the Windows XP recovery CD failed because there is no more stock. That left my friend with the last resort – manually install the OS and then download all the relevant drivers and install them one by one.

And so, after all is done, my friend discovered that he couldn’t get the panel buttons and the bluetooth to work no matter what he tried. BIOS settings were checked and rechecked to ensure that these hardware are already enabled but to no avail. Device Manager just refused to detect these hardware. It was as if these hardware was dead – the familiar yellow question mark that shows unknown hardware was nowhere to be found!

So, to double check, my friend formatted the hard disk and restored it using the Recovery CD. To his dismay, the panel buttons and bluetooth didn’t work either. And now, if this was a user, I would have just told him to check the Recovery CD again to find if the drivers are stored somewhere on a sub-folder, or advised him to download the drivers again from the Internet. But this is a friend whom I also seek advice from time to time on some computer problems my users have at work so as expected, he has already done all that.

My friend then sought the assistance of his colleague who is an expert in troubleshooting laptops and even that didn’t help. So, he once again wiped the hard disk, reinstalled it with Windows XP and brought it back to Fujitsu’s service centre to get it fixed as there is still a valid 3-year extended warranty.

Everything from registering, and getting attended to was more or less a breeze at the service centre. After explaining to the staff at the counter the issue, the staff disappeared with the laptop for like 10 minutes before he returns with… everything working.

It’s a job well done, but that left my friend puzzled. He tried to find out whether it was a hardware issue or a settings one, but all the staff could only reveal that the engineers reinstalled the drivers and he appeared reluctant to provide more information.

So my friend left the service centre sheepishly. He then proceeded to examine the laptop and he discovered extra files have been loaded. These extra files are not available from the archive downloaded from the Fujitsu website even though the version were the same.

This simply means both the Recovery CD and the drivers on the website were incomplete. My friend suspected that the drivers currently available on the website for Windows XP may not have been updated for a long time. The question now is, did the service centre staff have a more complete set of drivers compared to that uploaded to their website, which are also not available on the Recovery CD?

And if that is the case, why aren’t the complete drivers uploaded to the website? Has no one ever tested the Recovery CD before shipping it? Why did the staff not show my friend what could be done if this was so easily resolved?

These are the questions that probably only Fujitsu could answer.