U430P My Review

Shopping around for a 14 inch thin, light, powerful laptop after my 5 year old 13 inch Sony Viao motherboard died. Don't care for tablet style and did not need or want touch screen, but matte screen was a must. Wasn't able to get all the features in one machine but the U430P turned out to be a great machine for me.

likes:
quick performance- boot, wake, windows, webpages, etc.
silent fan, laptop does not get hot.
keyboard feel is really good.
keyboard backlights can be left on (does not depend on light sensor).
one button change volume, screen brightness, enable/disable touch pad.
aluminum frame feels strong and laptop is thin.
touchpad is good quality (but I almost always disable it and use a real mouse).

dislikes:
took 4 weeks to manufacture +3 days to ship.
keyboard spacing a little cramped (especially the chopped right shift key).
uninstalled annoying bloat ware- Browser Guard, Visual Discovery, McAfee Security.
it's little bit heavier than I expected (would have liked about one lb lighter).
cannot swap batteries (without cracking open the case).

good screen (but):
14 inch 1920x1080 matte screen. A matte screen is must for me. The brightness of the screen is very good. Webpages, graphics, pictures do look really good. What I don't like is the almost blurry system fonts. Maybe this is Windows 8.1 or cleartype rearing it's ugly face, I don't know...

Unable to find all the features I wanted:
wifi is not 5GHz N.
no optical drive (but got a free external because of the manufacturing delay)
body color silver only (with 1080p matte screen).

Overall I'm very happy with this machine. It does feel like an upgrade to my Sony Viao.