The time had come to retire my old PC, since I predominantly use external storage the time had come to swap the bulky old box for a laptop.
Big selling point for me has always been memory, so the 6Gb stood out amongst the others in this price range which tended to have only 4Gb. Add a 1Tb hard drive, and I have plenty of local storage for those times when I go roaming.
The core i3 processor happily handles anything I throw at it, processing a DVD to XviD on my media server in about 1/3 the time it would take to watch.
I made what I thought was a mistake at the time and bought one with Windows 8, but apart from the quirk of the start screen, this has been relatively trouble free.
One problem I did have, was a 3rd party drive partition software, which screwed up my whole operating system. At this point the One-Touch recovery was no use and I ended up having to format and re-install. The obvious problem with this is that the Lenovo doesn’t come with any disks.
Luckily copies of the Windows 8 disks (remember you buy a licence not the software) are available here-> http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/29322-The-Official-Windows-8-Repository and I was able to start from scratch (the activation and licence codes are built into the bios)
Getting back to the laptop itself, it runs silently and the keyboard is responsive and comfortable. Since I’m using it as a desktop, I’d have preferred the VGA, HDMI and network ports to be at the back and the headphone port gets in the way of my mouse, but these are minor problems and common to many laptops.
The big niggle for me however, is the touchpad. It looks good, just a slightly nobbled surface, but unfortunately that makes it difficult to see and use and I seem to be forever activating swipes to switch screens when trying to navigate the desktop.
Despite this, I’m happy with my new purchase and would recommend it to others.
