The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Just ordered mine today. Got the 10252DU (i5-2430M, 6gb ram, 500gb) for $509 used on Amazon. Should be here tomorrow. Going to throw my 8gb of ram & vertex 3 into it. Pretty excited.
I've spent a lot of time looking at ultrabooks lately then thought to myself, "This is stupid, do I really care how thin it is if I can pay half as much and get 500 - 700 mhz more cpu speed?" Not to mention the ability to upgrade ram & change the hdd.
So I've been using this thing for about a week and I'd highly recommend it with a few caveats. I got
this one which appears to be the top of the line model, for 509 used direct from amazon. As expected btw it appeared to be a new unit. It had the protective plastic on etc.
The Good: The track pad is excellent. It has that scruffy, highly textured feel like almost all track pad's did about 6 years ago. I never feel like my finger is going to brake due to friction.
The keyboard is about as good as I've used on any laptop. It doesn't hit any of my pet peeves, the left ctrl is the last key on the bottom left and none of the key's do alternative functions by default. Right shift seems a bit small but I only use left shift (I have my 13 year old self learning to type to thank for that).
Yes it's a 1366x768 screen but it's a much better display than my last 3 units or so. Good color and not horrible horizontal viewing angle. Vertical viewing angle pretty narrow.
The speakers are excellent. They have a clear "real speaker" sound that I've rarely heard coming from a laptop. They present a great stereo stage as well which is also rare.
The turbo scheme for my CPU is supposed to be 2.7 with two threads and 3.0 with one thread, but no matter how I load it (1 - 4 threads) it goes to straight 2.8. It'll stay right there too unless temps hit 84c where it down clocks to 2.4 which is stock speed for my CPU. I wonder if Lenovo did this in BIOS. Well for whatever reason they did this I prefer it since the unit never hits the down clock temp unless you run something aggressive like prime95. Encoding AVC video with 4 threads or any other real task hasn't pushed it that hard.
The not so good: It's pretty bulky. I would have preferred no optical drive and a thinner profile. I guess it's to be expected for a cheap, 13 inch unit with this much power under the hood.
The fan can be somewhat loud. It's not an unpleasant sounding, no dentist drill whine or anything. From what I've watched of the temps the fan's enthusiasm is for a good reason, there is a lot of heat to dissipate. Also the metal surface get's warm when you have this thing spun up. Not uncomfortably so though.
The HDD is slow. This might just be me since I've been on an ssd for a few years now but I don't know how excited I would be about owning this thing on the stock magnetic disk. Of course as soon as I plugged in my vertex 3 and reformatted the feel of this unit matches any modern desktop with a ssd.
The bad: No usb 3.0. Of course you know this going in.
Optical drive. Frankly a waste of space. I could think of a whole list of things I would have used that space for.
All told I really like it. I wouldn't have paid 700 bucks for my specific model but for 500 bucks it's a great buy. Maybe I'll switch to an ultrabook when they have Ivy Bridge CPUs inside but until then I'm perfectly happy with this thing.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
