Why I Would Never Recommend A Lenovo Thinkpad Laptop To Anyone

Even as a then Mac bigot the Lenovo (then IBM) ThinkPad with a writing pad and touchscreen was one of the few times I had bought a Windows laptop.

Fast forward to 2013 and I was given a brand new Lenovo W530 for work and hate it (though much less than the lousy new HP Ultrabook).

In 2013 a no touchscreen Microsoft Windows 8 laptop is funny enough, but it is designed by a team of truck designers or drivers. They put a 15 inch non-touch screen in a body bigger than most 17" laptops. And about as elegant.

WARNING: You need to buy a matching Samsonite luggage set for this, not to protect the laptop but to protect other people's luggage from it.

Get a set of two, one for the boulder-weight laptop and the other for the power adaptor just slightly lighter than a concrete block.

It has the weakest speakers on any laptop I have ever owned, and the world's most atrocious sandpaper textured trackpad that often requires multiple attempts to register movement.

And what can I say about the Lenovo web site designed by those who were rejected for mail room janitor jobs….

The site asks you for a 4-25 character ID, which it later rejects because you used non-AlphaNumeric characters, like a period in the name. They of course do not state it before you have clicked submit.

You write a short review and THEN the site does not accept it because it has "too much text"… but it does not tell you what the text limit it. This is the last time I will go to their web site….

Though Windows 8 has been rock solid on this and I have not had any crashes at all since I got it, the hardware is the worst ever from a company division that used to be IBM.

I cannot recommend this to anyone.... well, except my worst enemies. :-)

--

UPDATE 09/09/2013

------------------
As if things could not get worse, or as if to prove some latent tendency to feel pain and anger, I went to the Lenovo web site to look for some updated firmware and drivers. The made-by-Martians-for-Saturnites-living-on-Neptune interface would be funny if it did not make you cry for how you have to (or I had to) click on about a dozen or more links to display the drivers under various areas, and then to click on each of THOSE to see what the issue date was. If the date was later than the purchase date I downloaded it. (I did not download all because some were not relevant to me). When all was said and done, I dutifully and painfully installed each one by one… Until…

One of the update installers completed its work, asked for a reboot, which I allowed and then…

The Lenovo W530 stopped booting. It just stopped going past the Boot Menu, but instead of showing the various USB stick, external disk or even WIndows2Go on USB OS plus the internal drive, it simply showed ZERO boot devices available. In the meantime, the utilities area allowed me to run disk tests on the internal drive and memory etc. All came back 100% but the machine remained unbeatable. So, after spending one day trying to resolve that, I had to go in for a technician to try everything he could, and he had no luck either. FInally, the only way the machine was booted was with LAN startup and formatting and reinstalling the OS. That used up most of today. And now I have to dig for installers of all the files, not to mention the work in progress from the last few days that had not been backed up (since I am not at home in NY).

Word to the wise, Friends Don't Let Friends Buy Lenovo.

 

[I also posted this product review on Amazon]

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Laptops, Lenovo, HP, ThinkPad