- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Great product - if you know what you're buying"
Pros: Small, light weight, good looking, easy power adjustments.
Cons: Glossy Keyboard, poor resumability from sleep/hibernation, expensive.
Summary: I bought this laptop four months ago, and have used it almost every day since. I also brought it on a one month trip to Europe/Russia ? travel being the main reason I selected this product. I love this laptop, as it fulfills my requirements ? small, relatively fast, nice screen, and great battery life (with the larger battery). Remember that you are buying an ultra-portable for a reason, and as a result you wont get the same performance and feature set as you will with a larger machine. No, it doesn?t have an optical drive built in, but then when do you really need one? I used the portable drive that came with the laptop to install apps. Other than that I don?t need an optical drive, and really, in that sense its just a waste of space for me, so this has been a non-issue. I use this laptop primarily for working online, managing email, and simple documentation with Word, Excel, etc. During my trip I also used Photoshop and imported and edited many large image files. The laptop performed better than I expected for all tasks, including loading Photoshop (which is typically pretty slow on most laptops/desktops) and editing 10mb+ image files (the 2 GB of RAM is very nice for this). I have never done speed tests per se, but for me the real test is do I wait longer for files and apps to load and is there a lag in processing while I work? I haven?t really noticed that anything runs noticeably slower on this machine vs others I use. Sure, things may take milliseconds longer, but this is worth it to me considering the portability of this laptop. I have never had any issues with day to day use. The wireless card works as well as any, and I have the same range with this machine at home as I do with two other larger laptops I use. Hotspots are easy to connect to when im not at home. So in the area of general productivity, I have no complaints. I bought a much small messenger bag than I typically use to carry this around. Recently I brought my bigger laptop to the office in my larger bag, and I could really really tell the difference in size and weight ? like night and day. That?s the main benefit I get from the Ideapad. Length and width, Its about the size of a piece of paper. With the small battery its ridiculously light (get about 1.5 hours of time), and with the big its noticeably heavier, but still light (I get about 4.5 hours with the big one). I have two complaints. Both of these things **** me off about this machine. First ? The keyboard is glossy and shows EVERY fingerprint, smudge and spec of dust. No matter how clean my fingers are, the keyboard always looks dirty. Its almost embarrassing when sitting in public, as it makes me feel like I look like a slob. This made me want to clean it often. Every day practically. In wiping the keyboard clean, I accidentally lifted one of the keys and broke it off. The plastic that holds the keys to the board is about the size of a hair and obviously very fragile. Second, the machine is unpredictable when awakening from sleep or hibernation. Sometime I just need to open the screen and it?ll awaken. Sometimes I need to hit the power button before it?ll come to life. And sometime I need to restart it. needless to say, that?s annoying. All in all, a great machine. I would buy it again if I was given the choice.
