W520 Paint Rubs Off

Hello everyone!
My W520 is only a couple weeks old, and already the paint on all four top corners has completely rubbed off (the corners are shiny) and there is a smudge on the top of my computer of permanently rubbed-off paint. I'm EXTREMELY careful with my laptop and the only wear and tear it gets is when I carefully place it in my Northface backpack (with a soft built-in laptop sleeve) for transportation. After hearing so much about Thinkpad quality and durability, I'm really surprised the paint began rubbing off after a couple days.
Has anyone else had these problems (so quickly after purchasing)? Is there a possibility that the paint on my W520 is a bad batch?
Thank you!
- Michael
P.S. Other than the bad paint, the laptop is amazing and I would definitely recommend it to others. I've been an Apple user for 10 years and this is my first PC since then and I'm very happy with the performance... Just not the build quality. If Lenovo uses better quality materials, I would probably try to talk the entire applied mathematics deparment at my university to switch away from Apple. Seriously, this thing is blazingly fast and cuts through numerical computations on MATLAB and C!

Hi Michael:
I've had about half a dozen ThinkPads over the last 15 years. My experience has been that there will be a very tiny amount of 'rubbing off' (wear) of the paint in the corners after about 3 years of use. By 'tiny amount', I mean maybe a small spot that is about 1 mm in diameter in each corner.
I just purchased a new W520 (got it about 6 weeks ago) and I have been carring it around in a fairly tight-fitting Targus bag that I keep in the saddlebag of my motorcycle. In the last 6 weeks, I have ridden about 3,000 kilometers around Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece with the ThinkPad in my saddlebag - and there is no evidence of any wear at all on the ThinkPad. The roads are pretty poor in some of these countries, with lots of potholes and bumps...
What I am getting at is this: If you are seeing paint coming off of the top corners of your ThinkPad (this implies the top corners of your screen), then your laptop must be abrading (rubbing) against the inside of the sleeve that you carry it in, and the material on the inside of the sleeve is kind of working like sandpaper against the finish on the outside of the screen.
When we (as users) think about protecting our laptops with sleeves, bags, backpacks, etc., I think we normally think about protecting them from impact and from 'bumps' - but, if the sleeve is even a tiny bit bigger than the laptop itself, or if the laptop is not held securely (unable to move) in the bag or backpack, the corners of the laptop are going to rub against the protective container. Depending on what the material is inside the protective container, the results may be nothing at all (if the material is soft and smooth) or abrasion of the paint (if the material has texture to it, or especially if the material is a woven synthetic fibre).
Because of the rather extreme conditions my laptop experiences (in the motorcycle saddlebag), I have made sure that it is a snug fit into the protective bag, and can't move around inside the protective bag. Hence - no abrasion, no wearing off of the paint.
Hope this information provides you with useful food for thought.
Michael
W520 (4270 CTO), which replaced a W500 (4062-27U), which replaced a T42P, which replaced an A21P...

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