Note: this review is highly subjective, and is work in progress.
The criteria for choosing:
Choosing a new machine which you are going to sit in front of for 60 hours a week is not easy. For the last 4 years I have been using a MacBookPro and a Dell Dimension 9200. The criteria were this:
- Must have USB 3.0 (once you have tried it, you cant go back to USB 2 for external HDs)
- Must have at least 800 vertical resolution, ideally more (you cant effectively edit documents and read web pages with less)
- Must have Display Port or Dual link DVI to drive a 30" Dell monitor.
- Must have a 3 year NBD onsite warranty.
- Must have the latest Sandybridge processors (i5 or i7) to support heavy duty workload
- Must have 8GB ram or better.
- Must weight less than 2Kg.
- Must have a matt (ideally IPS) panel for using in any lighting conditions and photo/video editing.
- Be able to run Putty, Toad, Java, Eclipse and all its addons (including SVN), Office, Visio, MS Project (none of these will run on a Mac - )
The choice:
1) Dell
Dell have really good warranties, and generally good laptops. However, dell have no laptops with all of the above, even if you increase the weight allowance to 2.8kg.
2) Lenovo
The perfect laptop would have been the T420s. It is 1.8Kg, has USB 3, displayport, 2.7Ghz i7, dedicated graphics card option and you can put 3 HDs in it, and has 900 vertical resolution. However, the panel is of such poor quality, that the machine is unusable. Not a single owner did not notice or was not bothered by the screen door effect, for example
this thread and this
review.
This is where you can see the grid effect
3) Other manufacturers, such as Sony and Apple have better HW, but their international warranties suck. I need it fixed within 2 days, and dont want to have to post it and wait for 3 months or drive 100 miles to find a repair center.
The purchased machine spec:
| Processor: | Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor (2.20GHz, 6MB L3) |
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| Operating system: | Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 |
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| Display type: | 15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display, Mobile Broadband Ready |
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| System graphics: | NVIDIA Quadro 2000M Graphics with 2GB DDR3 Memory |
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| Total memory: | 8 GB PC3-10600 DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM) |
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| Pointing device: | UltraNav with TrackPoint & touchpad plus Fingerprint reader |
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| Camera: | 720p Camera |
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| Hard drive: | 320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm |
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| Optical device: | DVD recordable multiburner |
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| System expansion slots: | Express Card Slot & 4 in 1 Card Reader |
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| Battery: | 9 cell Li-Ion Battery - 55++ |
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| Bluetooth: | Bluetooth 3.0 |
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| Integrated WiFi wireless LAN adapters: | Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3x3 AGN) |
ThinkPlus ThinkPad 3 Years Onsite Repair + Accidental Damage Coverage
Cost inc. delivery & UK VAT @ 20%:
£1942.44
Screen
The 1080p TN 95% RGB gamut display was the main reason for buying this beast. It is stunning in its brightness, sharpness, contrast and colour vividness. However, appears to be horribly uncalibrated. The reds are so over saturated, that the orange firefox logo comes out crimson red, with loss of detail. The photos included as part of windows look over saturated. Unless they are actually like that, and all my other monitors have it wrong! Checking the forums, there are a number of posts saying the included ICC profile is just a rename of the windows default one. I downloaded a profile posted by another W520 owner with the same panel which has helped a bit, but to be usable for photo or video work, I'm going to have to buy a colorimeter. Lenovo is punishing us for opting out of the £60 built in colour calibrator. Ive just realised something shocking: to make photos look good on everyone elses cheap small gamut monitors, Im am going to have to edit on a cheap small gamut monitor. So currently I do all my photo work on an old external monitor. Dont assume like I did that 95% Gamut means it will be suitable for photo editing. If anything, its the worst screen I have used so far due to its red oversaturation. Why cant Lenovo give us decent IPS panels?
The same photo opened in Firefox 6 (which is supposed to correctly handle ICM profiles;windows photo viewer (which may not) and lightroom (which should) are completely different. Windows photoviewer shows the reds massivly oversaturated, firefox somewhat over saturated but much better, and lightroom massivly undersaturated. The photo was created on a PC with £1200 calibrated IPS panel in photoshop, and looks good everwhere except on the W520. The photo was shot and saved with sRGB profile (on a Canon 5DmkII).
The screen ratio is another problem. 16:9 landscape might be good for watching films and gaming, but its very bad at everything else. Documents and web pages are long and narrow, not short and wide. The 4:3 offered by my old Dell D600 was absolutely perfect. Why we are being forced to use 16:9 for anything other than a TV is beyond me. Even using lighroom and photoshop is painful - you end up with a small image in the middle of the left and right toolbars with lots of grey to the left and right of the image. Applications are trying to adapt to the panel makers widescreen fetish: Firefox and IE have both reduced the height of their menus and toolbars. In IE, they have put the address bar on the same line as the tabs, so you cant see the full address any more. I have also moved the windows 7 taskbar to the left side instead of bottom to try and make more horizontal space. Its horrible to use - I would much rather have it at the bottom. I had hoped that the 1080 horizontal resolution would mean this was not required, but then you cant make use of the width. I cant wait for this trend to reverse. Even Apple doesnt go as far as 16:9, they use 16:10 for macbooks and a perfect 4:3 for the ipad.
Note: this is a very high resolution screen. While you can change the windows font size to say 150%, most applications ignore this. In Firefox and skype for example, most text is around 3mm high. I have very good eyesight, but I would not want to read it for long. You can of course increase the browser font size, but this often breaks the page formatting. I use this excellent
readability tool for firefox: It magically picks out just the article form the page, and displays it in a very readable (and printable) format. You cant do anything about the tiny font in skype though.
A big dissapointment for photo editing.
7/10
Graphics
The nVidia Quadro 2000M is not cheap. Although it is not labeled as a gaming card, it has a reasonable spec (192 pipelines@550MHz).
Despite Steam complaining that the card is not in its database, it plays left 4 dead 2 as well as my 4 year old high end gaming rig.
It doesnt Manage World Of Tanks at 1080p on high, it drops to less than 20 fps e.g. when in sniping mode and becomes jerky. It has to be played on medium, which loses the realistic graphics and becomes more cardboard cutout type.
The Free
3DMark score at 1280x1024 is:
3DMark Score
6533 3DMarks
Graphics Score 5366
CPU Score 18812
Jane Nash 15 FPS
New Calico 15 FPS
AI Test 2615 operations/s
Physics Test 24 operations/s
Trackpad.
This is the weakest part of the W520. It is so bad, Im amazed other reviews haven't picked up on this. Perhaps they have not had to use it for any length of time. Basically, Lenovo have mad a huge notebook with a tiny and inadequate trackpad.
Firstly, it is way too small for such a big screen. In fact, its significantly smaller than the trackpad on my tiny 1.4kg Tosbiba R830.
Secondly, it has the wrong aspect ratio, its almost square compared with the screens 16:9 ratio.
Thirdly, the textured pad hurts after prolonged use, even set to the lightest touch sensitivity possible.
Fourthly, the two finger scroll jestures, which work so brilliantly on the macbook and cheap toshiba, are a disaster on the lenovo. I dont know what they have done, but it takes 2 or 3 attempts to get it to recognise your swipe, then when it does, it jumps all teh way to the end. Its unusable.
In my opinion, it has wasted space on the nipple buttons. About 15 years ago I used the nipple extensively on early Toshiba laptops. After a few years, I began to get a lot of pain in the top join of my index finger. Now if I use the nipple control even for half a minute, I get pain in the top joint of my index finger for days. Be warned.
After going from the brilliant trackpad on my 4 year old MacBook Pro and the more than adequate on on the cheap and cheerful Toshiba R830, the Lenovo trackpad gets 0 out of 10.
0/10
Keyboard
Excelent keys. You can type all day on this with speed, accuracy and no strain. The enter key is double height, the space bar doesn't miss a click and the layout close to the ideal Dell keyboard layout. It has buttons for volume control, mute mike, mute speakers and wifi. Perfect.
The only three problems:
- Its hard to accurately hit the arrow keys as they have a page left/right next to them. I would have preferred to lose the page left/right removed, to make the arrow keys more useable.
- It also has no backlight, which I really miss. Does Apple have the patent on this?
- The FN and CTRL keys are the wrong way round, and different to every keyboard I have used on any computer ever. I just done a count - I have 9 keyboards in the office, and they are all the "correct" way round, even my 2 Mac keyboards. Its going to be awkward using cut and paste with the thinky
8/10
Crapware
Like the Toshiba R820, the lenovo is full of useless and unwanted, outdated freeware, trial ware and useless utilities. Unlike the Toshiba, there are no uninstall options for many of the items - so it will permanently clutter your HD and registry, unless you start manually deleting files and registry entries.
Why would we want our notebooks filled with out of date free-ware which you can easily download yourself? E.g. on this machine is an
Trash includes:
- Preinstalled but non functional office 2010 requiring online purchase to use. I could download the trial or purchase online myself if I wanted it. I actually already have office, so had to remove this rubbish to install my own copy.
- Office Starter 2010. Delete! I dont think anyone who spends 2k on a notebook will be using office starter.
- Norton AV. Get rid and install the faster and better AVG free or decent Micosoft Security Essentials. Unfortunately, you cant delete it all, it stays in the program menu and the install files are left on the HD requiring manual hacking to remove.
- An old version of skype which leaves the install data lying round. Skype is free, if I wanted it I would download it faster than getting this old version installed, updated then trying to work out how to delete the old versoin install files and links.
- Biztree business in a box. No uninstaller. Install files left on HD and program shortcuts are permaently on the start menu - requiring manual removal. This is just their trial download. There is no license.
ThinkVantage tools
Toshiba have devoted a dedicated blue button on the keyboard for this suite of waste of time and unstable tools (some just crash). When you go to the help pages to find what the tools are actually good for, it spends a lot of time trying to justify why you should not just delete them out of hand.
Lenovo recovery media
This is very poorly written app. Firstly, it hangs in the "extracting files". After about 10 minutes I would kill it. I tried this 3 times, and was about to give up and not create it when the final time I happened to leave it for 1h. After this amount of time, it finally gives you the option to burn to disk. However, it doest tell you want type of disk it needs, or how much space it will use. I guessed it would want a DVD for the recovery system, but in fact it formats the DVD with CDFS and used only 300MB, so I would have been better putting in a CD. Let us compare this with the recovery media creator on the Toshiba:
- Toshiba tells you how many disks are required, lenovo doesn't.
- Toshiba starts writing disks immediately, Lenovo appears to hang in "extracting files" for a very long time with no progress indicator.
- Toshiba tells you what to label the disk after each one. Lenovo leaves you to remember what it just burnt.
Not impressed with the quality of the Lenvo crapware at all.
0/10
Fingerprint Reader
I have not had the pleasure of using one of these before. With the machine switched off, you can just swipe your finger, and it will boot right up to your logged in desktop. Brilliant. When the machine is asleep, however, and you open the lid, it takes 3 or 4 seconds for the fingerprint reader to become active. This seems like an age compared with if the machine is switched off. Why is this?
Regognition rates are not good for me, it usually takes 3 swipes, each getting slower and pressing harder.
You don't have to use the reader - you can always login with your password etc.
After 3 weeks, I got the message "Cannot find fingerprint sensor device" and that was it for the fingerprint reader. According to the Forums/Google, there are lots of Lenovo owners with the same problem, but no solutions. It was at this point I tried to find out how to contact Lenovo support via email or online ticketing system. As of yet, I have failed to find anyway of conacting them, except the outrageously expensive (11p off peak) office hours only phone number. I refuse to spend hours on hold, waiting for a non-technical operator to tell me to reinstall windows and all my apps (a 2 day operation) "just in case that works" whilst racking up a huge phone bill.
Update: A workaround is to shutdown the machine, unplug the power, remove the battery, wait 1 minute, insert the battery, connect the power then boot up. Then the Fingerprint Reader device comes back.
0/10
Battery
The site gave me no option but to have the 9cell battery. I wanted the 6 cell or smaller. The 9 cell sticks out the back about 2cm and means you cant fit it into a normal15" notebook case. It is also heavier. I will never use this notebook on batteries - I only use it as a built in UPS.
There is one good Lenovo untility - you can specify that the charging should stop at say 90%, and not start again till say 75%. This should keep the battery very healthy compared with the windows default which charges the batter almost constantly to keep it above 99%. I wish I had this feature on my MacBook Pro which after a year an only 30 recharge cycles was completely dead. As batteries cost over £100, this feature should save you a lot of money.
With light use (document editing), the (brand new) battery says it will last 4+ hours, which is not bad for such a beast.
7/10
Sound
After spending £2000 on a machine with possibly a widescreen panel ideal for games and movies, I was very disappointed that there is no optical or SPDIF output like there is on my old macbook pro. The best you will get is stereo 3.5mm jack. There is no separate Microphone in socket - its combined with the stereo, and I believe requires a special adapter to use. This machine is capable of playing the latest games, but forget their surround sound. You will have to fork out and carry round a separate USB sound card which offers SPDIF.
The mic is a huge disappointment. Its not possible to hear what you are saying when using Skype or in games, such as teamspeak. It sounds like you are talking undwater - you cant make out the words. I tried the various options, including disabling the VOIP enhancements in the "Lenovo web conferencing" and "Smart Audio" control panels. When you combine the appalling mic with poor speakers,you will quickly go out and buy a usb headset (logitec 960 is excellent by comparison) for skype. After much research, the problem is partially fixable by setting the microphone setup to "conference room" in the smart audio app (type smart in the search box then hit the VIOP icon at the bottom). Every W520 has this problem, so you will need to make this change. With this "fix", the built in microphone is usable, but poor. Get a headset, and use a different machine for skype conference calls.
If you go to control panel and search for "smart" you will get the smart audio control panel, a utility supplied by Conexant. It has an equalizer with a bunch of presents and a 3D effect. Bizzarely, the 3D effect is enabled when you set it to "VoIP". While it is possible to optimse the sound, you wont find any bass, or be able to remove the tininess. Ambient music is listenable, but anything heavy like Korn or guitar based like Foo Fighters doesnt sound great. Certainly the sound quality is in the bottom of the scale of notebooks, and noticably worse than my old MBP. The maximum volume also is very low - its not possible to use this to listen to a movie in a lounge, as I did with my MBP.
For business use, the poor quality of voice and poor skype experience is unacceptable on a premium business machine (or any notebook really).
0/10
Ports
This machine offers 4 USB ports, which sounds ok until you realise that you need one of them to drive your USB skype headset (as there is no separate mic in), one needed to drive a Dual link DVI adapter so you can plug in your dell 30" monitor, one for your external e-sata HD and one for your external USB3 HD. This would leave no ports for your mouse or keyboard. I have to use an additional powerd USB hub. I would have hoped that there be 4 USB 2.0 ports in addition to the e-sata and USB 3 on a machine this big.
There is a 3/4 express card slot, which is handy for my 3/4 16GB card. Personally, I dont mind not having the full size one (which odly is available on the much smaller X220 I belive).
8/10
Performance
From the first couple of week using just lightroom, eclipse and office, I notice a small speed increase over my 5 year old Dell 9200 with a Core 2 E6600 2.4GHz, 3GB ram and Windows XP. To be honest, the Dell has two HDs, with the photos on one and the lightroom DB on the other, so is probably faster for most activities. Ill benchmark some specific tasks and see if there is any performance advantage of the Quad i7 over the old E6600 for the tasks I happend to do.
I now find that Lenovo use slower 1333 MHz ram instead of the 1600 MHz the processor supports. Apparently, even if you replace it with the faster stuff, it only runs at the slower speed.
The machine runs surprisingly cool - even play L4D2 for 2 hours it does not get hot, only warm. My old 2nd Gen MacBook Pro 15" used to overheat shut down after half an hour of MOH during the summer.
This machine has a Windows Experience index of 5.9. This is exactly the
same as the experience index of the much less t420s with a dual core i7 and much smaller graphics card. This is pretty shocking. Look at the breakdowns:
T420s (i7-2620 @ 2.7, 8GB ram, Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics, 500GB 7200RPM)
Processor: 7.1
Memory: 7.5
Graphics: 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 6.4
Disk: 7.7
W520 (i7-2720QM @ 2.2GH, Quadro 2000M, 320GB 7200 RPM drive)
Processor 7.3
Memory: 7.6
Graphics: 6.9
Gaming Graphics 6.9
Disk: 5.9
As you can see, all the numbers are pretty much the same. I dont know why the disk is so much slower on the W520, they should be pretty similar as they are both WS Scrorpio Black 7200 RPM drives.
UPDATE: I found that the W520 i7-2720 BIOS had a huge bug which was fixing the CPU to 2.2GHz, no matter if the machine was idle on battery (in which case it should throttle down to .8GHz), or one core was being hammered (in which case it is supposed to increase it to 3.3GHz). After 3 months of searching for a solution, bios update 1.30 has an undocumented fix for this. Now my machine benchmarks are > 25% faster, and lasts another hour on battery. Hundreds of people were complaining about this problem, and Lenovo never acknowledged it. Instead they quietly put an undocumented fix in the latest driver. If you get a W520, make sure you are on bios 1.30.
Warranty
One of the main reasons for buying Lenovo is the 3 year onsite next business day European warranty.
I added this to the configuration at purchase time for a resonable additional
£106.20 + VAT.
Now the fingerprint reader is dead, I wanted to conact support. First thing I notice is that the Lenovo tools say that this computer only has the standard carry in warranty. I looked in vain for a way to sumbit an emil or ticket - there is none. You have to call their premium rate support number during office hours only. £6 of phone calls later, support say they cant do anything about the incorrect warranty and I would have to email thinkpls_we@lenovo.com, and that because I was in Spain calling the UK support number, they could do nothing to help me - I would have to call the spanish number (I dont speak Spanish). I emailed thinkpls_we@lenovo.com, and got no confirmation or reply for 3 days. Then I got a mail asking for a POP number and an Authorization number, neither of which I have. Serveral days later, Lenovo warranty dept say they cant help me either, and that I have to take it up with the company who supplies the laptops for the lenovo website and whom I ahve never heard of: - Digital River. So Lenovo has passed the buck completely on a missing Lenovo Warranty on a Lenovo Product bought from Lenovo. How I miss Dell. Even Apple support was better than this.
It took me 3 months, 6 calls, 23 emails, 10 posts to the forums and about 10 hours of my time to get the warranty I purchased form the website. Finally I have it. Also, I have it in writing that the warranty is in fact European, which they say overrules the previouls email I have from the Lenovo warrantly team stating that the warrantly is not European, and only works in the coutry it was purchased in.
Let us compare this with Dell, whos support we have been using for the last 10 years:
- I can email Dell technical support anytime at no cost.
- I can call Dell in UK, and they will have the new part to me within 24 hours in Spain or Gibraltar, or they will arrange for a pickup.
- Dell phone lines are open 8-8 mon to saturday, rather than 9-6 mon-fri
- Every Dell PC I have seen comes with the correct warranty out of the box, where as all Lenovos come with the base warranty only, and you have to go through pain to get the purchase warranty. It takes between 1 and 3 months go get the warranty. Without it, you can get no support unless you have proof of purchase of the warranty. However, when you buy it from the Lenovo site at the time of buying the computer, you are not sent any proof of purchase, only a confirmation email which the Support team wont accept.
- Dell staff and customers can instantly lookup the warranty and pc configuration by simply entering the serial number. It seems that Lenovo have nothing like this.
On the
lenovo uk support site many of the links are broken and simply go to the top of the current page, including the register your product. There is no option to fix an incorrect warranty, only to view your incorrect one.
Reading the "European" warranty small print, it says:
"All your rights and all Lenovo’s obligations are valid only in United Kingdom. "
So basically they seem to be saying they may or may not help you when you are traveling in Europe, which negates the whole point of getting a Lenovo European warranty.
So far:
Lenovo -10/10
Dell 10/10 (I have 6 dell machines in my office alone)
Conclusion
I should not have bought this machine. Its extremely expensive, and has many small disappointments.
It is not noticeably faster for office, lightroom and photoshop than my 5 year old dual core desktop.
The trackpad is too small, and two finger scrolling just doesnt work so my idea of using it in the lounge with my family instead of my office have gone out the (lounge) window.
The lenovo support and warrantly are far inferior to Dells so far.
The 2.2 Quad core was a big mistake with hind sight - my other notebook has a cheap i5 dual core, and this is a faster machine for daily use as its dual core clock speed is faster.
However, its bomb proof, future proof, fast and has a stunning screen (which will be great once I work out how to calibrate it), and there is not much competition.
Update 8/1/2012
Haveing had the machine for 7 months, I can report a number of problems:
- Cruical RAM which is "guaranteed compatible with the W520" on their website causes the machine to blue screen every few hours when installed. Have sent back for a refund. Do not buy Crucial with the W520. Am sourcing some Samsung chips with the same model number as the ones inside.
- Battery drain. When the machine is shutdown (i.e. powered off), the battery drains at a rate of 10% every 24 hours not plugged in. This seems to affect a small number of owners, and there is no cure. A poor workaround is to disconnect the battery for a few seconds after shutting down, then reconnecting it.
- The speedstep/turbo boost issues are largely fixed, so the machine can now run at full speed when needed, and also throttle down when on battery. Amazing that they released a notebook without testing, and took so long to fix. All machines had these problems.
- Audio. The Mic is still universally appaling, and barely usable for a single person skype call (not usable for conferences). The speakers are still so quiet they cant be used for any kind of multimedia, or in a noisy room. They are much louder in Linux, so it seems to be a Lenovo windows driver issue.
- The "Access Connections" started working only sometimes (greyed out when not working), and is now dead. re-installing did not help. Several other are reporting the same problem. The workaround is to remove it completely and go back to windows networking, and lose the extra functionality (e.g. being able to swtich to different networks with different default printers etc on the fly)
- No resolution for the two finger srolling on the trackpad, which I would still rate as unusable compared to anyother non-lenovo notebook from the last 5 years.
