Lenovo IdeaPad Y510

Well, my son's Ideapad has been in the house a few days now so I figure its about time I put out an opinion on it. I'm not a professional reviewer so this is more of a usability review than a technical one.

System:

Lenovo Ideapad Y510

Intel core 2 Duo T5750 @2.00 GHz, 3GB Ram, 32bit Vista Premium 160GB hard drive and Intel graphics.

Initial thoughts:

The notebook comes in a nice compact black and orange box with minimal waste. Everything was easy to find and well protected. Upon removing the unit from the box I was impressed with the weight which feels like it is less than my old Inspiron 6000. The second thing that impressed me was the looks of the unit, fabric pattern lid combined with a glossy black finish looks very nice. Lenovo even included a wiping cloth to keep the unit clean and trust me it collects dust. The battery went in very easily and fits securely. I also liked the color coated ports which make it easier to pick them out. The power adapter plugs into the left side of the system which should alleviate accidentally pulling out the cord but I would have appreciated at least one USB on the rear to plug in a mouse. USB port aside, the unit is very well laid out.

After plugging the unit in I powered it up and completed the obligatory Windows settings and created my account as well as one for my son. I then removed the Microsoft Office trial, Norton trial and Earthlink offers. Having a clean system I went into parental controls and locked down my son's access to offensive sites and made sure that his favorites were allowed. I noticed that the keyboard was not a firm as my Dell. Hard to explain really as it didn't have any give to the board just seems that the keys are more springy. I'm not a huge fan of the touch pad because my finger kept slipping off due to it being nearly the same level as the case. The touch pad buttons were also level and flat, its hard to tell the touch pad from the case because they both have the same texture as well.

The next thing I did was install iTunes and import my son's music to the system and installed a couple of games he likes to play. After that it was time to really play around with the system. It has Internet Explorer but that is what he is used to so I didn't install FireFox. I did notice that the Internet was much faster on his system than my current one which made me a bit jealous. I quickly bookmarked the favorites and did a few tests of the parental controls which worked well. I then decided to listen to some music to test out the Dolby Home Theater sound of the system. WOW!! What a difference between the Lenovo and my Dell. It was far from a true home theater experience but much better than any notebook I've ever owned.

Movies looked nice on the system except for the glossy screen glare but sounded great with the Dolby system. Games also sounded much better. My only complaint about the Dolby sound isn't with Dolby but Lenovo for the wonky control buttons. The buttons are touch sensitive and only half show at a time which means you have to use a toggle button to go from set to set. Its not really that bad as one set controls play, stop, pause, etc. while the other set is to use different sound settings.

The other thing I was looking fore ward to was Lenovo's face recognition software. The system took a few pictures of me and then associated it with all my passwords. Every time you use a password on the computer an option pops up to save it in the password locker. I logged in and out of the system a few times to test it out and the scanning software worked perfectly. The password locker worked nicely as well. I then moved to another room and suddenly the system didn't recognise me. After adjusting my posture and making sure the lighting wasn't too bright the system was able to determine it was me again. Overall I would give the face scan a so-so rating and would most likely take it out if it were my system. My son still likes it and loves having the Lenovo to play around with. I had heard good things about Lenovo and I would say the praise is well deserved. If Lenovo would add the Dolby sound to the Thinkpads I would buy one in a heartbeat. Oh heck I'll most likely buy one even without it.

Scores:

Vista performance scores

Processor 4.9
Memory 4.5
Graphics 3.4
Gaming 3.5
Hard disk 5.1
Overall 3.4

W Prime 32m speed 43.8