My uncle had recently asked me to help him purchase a budget laptop. His requirements were a big screen to watch DVDs, a webcam to chat with friends, and lots of space to store movies and pictures, all for under $600.
After searching the deal sites for a couple weeks, I found a decent deal for a Lenovo IdeaPad Y530. Spec wise, it is a decent system; 2.0GHz Intel Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive, quite similar to my MacBook Pro.
After a couple days with the Lenovo, what I discoverd was this brand new laptop was mysteriously slow. It had problems connecting to my wifi network, and it hangs on shutdown. I thought about reformatting it, but it didn’t come with any media. So I was left to uninstall the bloatware, and do my best to speed up the user experience. Disabling Aero transparency and removing unnecessary startup items helped out a lot. But during this process, I wondered how my uncle would have fared if he had to be the one to configure his new computer.
I think this Lenovo experience was the first time I used the factory installation of Windows. What struck me most was that compared to my MacBook Pro, the Lenovo user experience was not very pleasant. When I first booted my Mac, I answered a few questions, and I was ready to go. No uninstalling bloatware, no problems with connecting to wifi networks, no weird issues to diagnose.
The Lenovo is in pretty good shape now and runs pretty smoothly, it’s pretty pleasant to use. What wasn’t very pleasant was getting it to this state.
eep! Glad you were able to help out UK.
[...] user experience. It was nice because it didn’t come with a lot of crapware that the Lenovo IdeaPad came with, the laptops are fast and responsive (like any new laptop should [...]