This has been an ordeal for me.
I ordered a W500 at the end of September (9/26 to be exact).
I received an order confirmation but no billing confirmation the following week. I contacted Lenovo Support and was told they could not access my order. I then called US Sales Support and they got me in contact with a supervisor at the outlet center in North Carolina. After a few minutes, he found my order and found the problem. I was concerned because the W500 was the specification I wanted and was now out of stock. There was an order mixup according to the supervisor. He said he would take care of the order the same day he first looked into it. This was October 7th. Within one day, my W500 (same ordered specification) was sent out (October 8th). I received the W500 in 4 days. Outstanding customer service!!!
I then applied for the WIndows 7 upgrade when I noticed that all outlet computers do not qualify. I was now very concerned because I was intitally told that any computer purchased from the end of June through the end of January 2010 qualified. I was told this by the agent at the 1-866-xx-xxxxx number. I was actually told this on 3 different occasions as I was considering a Dell outlet computer and the models I was looking at did qualify. Based on what I was told, I purchased my W500. Well, I applied and the application was entered. I received no confirmation for quite some time (that seems to be the standard operation procedure for this process). I made a call to US Sales Support and was told that outlet center purchased do not qualify. I asked to speak to a supervisor and discussed my scenario with him. He asked me what I purchased and I told him. I also gave him my order number and he researched it. He told me that it appears that my computer should qualify.
I resigned myself that I probably would not get the Lenovo upgrade so I began researching the best means to purchase a copy of Windows 7 from retail/internet sources. I had decided to purchase a full retail version, much to my chagrin, so that I could do an absolutely clean install but the purchase would have to wait because I just started my own company (being laid off at the end of August). About 4 weeks ago I received a confirmation email that my Windows 7 order had been processed. I received an email that my order payment had been processed about a week ago. Today, my upgrade copy of WIndows 7 arrived in my mail box.
This has indeed been an ordeal. I had my hard drive fail on my refurb W500 within 2 weeks of receiving it. My 9 cell battery was not holding its charge. I also had the wrong restore disks sent with my computer which caused problems with loading the proper configuration and drivers. I received replacement HDD, 9 cell battery, and a new set of correct restoration disks. My computer is now operating very well, in spite the OS being Vista Business 32 bit. By the way, I do not like Vista.
The happy dilemma is that I have to decide whether to keep Vista (for now) because all my software is loaded and running well or upgrade and reapply for license keys for some of my software. As I type this post, I am saving my data on an external hard drive in the preperation to install Windows 7.
To all those waiting for their copy of Windows 7 upgrade, I am certain it is just around the corner.