Expert's recommendations
Lenovo Ideapad Y450 14″ Notebook is an affordable, well designed, portable laptop, which offers a good battery life. Internally, it is powered by the Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo T4200 2GHz processor. A 3GB RAM is present in this mobile PC, which can be upgraded to a maximum of 8GB. A 250GB hard drive is housed in this device too. A DVD read/write drive has been packed in this notebook PC as well.
The display of this small laptop has a diagonal measure if 14 inches. The resolution presented by this screen is 1366 x 768 pixels. The Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics card has been employed for handling the motion pictures in this device. The Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium operating system comes pre-loaded in this portable computer.
For networking, WiFi as well as wired Ethernet connectivity are supported by this mobile computer. A good set of interfaces is present on board this laptop too. This includes 3 USB ports, an eSATA port, a Firewire port, an HDMI socket, a headphone jack, a Kensington lock, a VGA connector, a microphone jack and an Ethernet connector. A 6-in-1 card reader and an ExpressCard slot are also packed into this notebook. A 1.3 Megapixel web camera has been integrated into this device as well.
Available in 6 kinds of configurations, the price of the Lenovo Ideapad Y450 Notebook PC, varies according to the features and specifications that are opted. The base model costs about $650 (£408). The higher end models which feature more powerful processors, graphics, RAM, hard drive and Bluetooth cost about $899 (£565). A UK release is not mentioned yet. Let’s hope there will be one soon.
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I ordered the Lenovo Y450 (model 418938U). A nice-looking laptop, and seems to work OK for the most part, except that the wrist-rest area gets very hot during usage. I’m not talking about warm, I’m talking hot. It was so uncomfortable I decided to call tech support and report the problem. The tech support guy said “they are all like that”. I’ve never used a laptop that got so hot.
I will also add that when I was going through the personalization features, the Windows Vista explorer would stop responding, and I had to shut it down and restart. This isn’t a good sign either, especially since this was supposedly a very powerful machine with the Core 2 Duo processor.
I called the sales department, and they said I would have to pay to ship the unit back + pay a 15% restocking fee (I have to pay because they don’t consider the unit to be faulty). All that for the priviledge of trying out their machine for less than 24 hours. So I’m sending it back, and my only hope is to dispute the restocking fee with my credit card.
The rest of you can take your chances, but honestly I will never do business with this company again. Their poorly designed (or faulty) product ended up costing me $100 to try out for a single day. You’ve been warned.